Workshops

Water, Rivers, Coasts, and Oceans March 2022 - Moorea
Food and Health May 8-9, 2023 - Arizona
Energy and Urbanization December 6-7, 2023 - New York
Nature - Biodiversity and Climate Early 2024 - Washington D.C

Webinars

Friday, November 3 at 1pm ET | Small identifiers with big impacts: examples from archaeological fieldwork, Sarah Kansa, Open Context

Abstract: The importance of identifiers is difficult to convey to many researchers that lack formal training in databases or data management. While under-appreciated, identifier practices can have big downstream impacts on data re-use.

In this webinar, we will discuss common identifier practices in the context of an archaeological field project. Different archaeological artifacts, ecofacts (animal or plant remains associated with past human behavior), architectural features, and stratigraphic deposits are all understood in relation to one another. Such relationships inform the understanding of “context”, which is a core interpretive concept in archaeology. Naming and identifying the locations, objects, and other things involved in these contextual relationships make identifier practices critically important in archaeology.

Through observations and interviews with archaeologists in the field, our team identified recording practices around identifier creation during archaeological excavation that led to confusion or ambiguities that impacted the sample’s later use. We also interviewed data re-users and found that many of their frustrations with re-using data created by others stemmed from identifier problems during initial recording of samples.

We will discuss some of our attempts to find pragmatic improvements to streamline identifier practices during archaeological field work. We attempted to find solutions that could be feasible to implement in challenging field conditions with “off the shelf” software and limited network connectivity. We hoped to limit disruptions to existing practices while promoting greater long term persistence and more global findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability of archaeological samples.

Bio: Sarah Kansa is Executive Director of the Alexandria Archive Institute, a California non-profit organization that develops Open Context, a data publishing service for archaeology and cultural heritage. Sarah collaborates on projects that advance data publishing and data literacy in various archaeological and cultural heritage communities. She has a Ph.D. in archaeology (University of Edinburgh) and has spent more than 25 years conducting zooarchaeological research at sites in the Middle East and Europe. She served as Vice President of the International Council for Archaeozoology (ICAZ) from 2014-2018 and President from 2018-2023. Sarah is chair of the Digital Technology Committee for the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) and served on the Publications Committee for the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) and the American Society of Overseas Research (ASOR). She is also the series co-editor for Archaeobiology (Lockwood Press) and Executive Editor of Open Context. She participates on several grant-funded projects, most recently as a co-director on Advancing FAIR+CARE Practices in Cultural Heritage, funded by the IMLS.

Friday, September 8 at 1pm ET | Connecting samples to the research ecosystem through documentation and discovery tools, Lindsay Powers, USGS

Recording

Abstract: Physical samples are often expensive and irreplaceable assets foundational to understanding the universe and its processes, and they should be preserved and made available for ongoing or new research. For these assets to be useful in this capacity, they must have descriptive documentation and be readily discoverable to interdisciplinary users. Persistent unique identifiers (PIDs) for people, organizations, data, publications, scientific collections, and samples, greatly facilitate the discovery of relevant physical samples for new research by connecting samples to all elements of the research ecosystem.

The U.S. Geological Survey has improved tools to better document scientific collections and samples and connect research assets through persistent unique identifiers. Among these, the mdEditor is a metadata creation and editing tool developed collaboratively with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife service to broadly facilitate rich metadata description for multiple domain data, sample, and collection types. The mdEditor has been adapted to create descriptions for physical scientific collections, which are cataloged in the Registry of Scientific Collections (ReSciColl). In addition, we are developing the AIS (Asset Identification Service) to manage and provision persistent unique identifiers; DOIs for data, publications, and scientific collections; International Generic Sample Numbers (IGSN) for physical samples; PIDs for metadata records and others as needed. ReSciColl provides the opportunity to include PIDs for people (ORCID), organizations (ROR), collections data and publications (DOI), and physical samples (IGSN). Consistent use of PIDs in our enterprise systems, provides an explicit mechanism for asset interoperability and assures that these valuable resources can be discovered and assessed for relevance for new discovery.

Bio: Lindsay is trained as a multidisciplinary scientist with an education and research experience in aquatic ecology, population genetics, limnology, and paleoclimatology. Lindsay completed her B.A at Macalester College, her M.S. at University of Montana, and her Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. Her current work at the U.S. Geological Survey is primarily concerned with preserving, modernizing, and facilitating access to scientific collections of physical samples. Lindsay is the Program Coordinator for the National Geological and Geophysical Data Preservation Program and Director of the USGS Geological Materials Repository, home to the Core Research Center and the National Science Foundation Ice Core Facility.

Friday, July 7 at 1pm ET | Subdivisions and Crossroads: Identifying Communities in Data Citation Networks, Sara Lafia

Recording

Abstract: Archives that provide access to high-quality research data offer an ideal setting to study the community impact of data sharing. In this talk, I will describe an analysis of the data citation network available through ICPSR – a social science data archive at the University of Michigan – which reflects patterns of data reuse in academic literature in research communities that use the same scientific datasets. These communities are characterized as disciplinary “subdivisions” or integrative “crossroads” that connect research areas. I show how data citation allows us to understand scholarly communication processes, such as the organization of scientific communities, and will discuss implications for the citation of samples.

Bio: Sara Lafia is a Research Fellow in the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) at the University of Michigan. Her research is supported by an NSF project, Developing Evidence-based Data Sharing and Archiving Policies, in which she analyzes curation activities, trains models to detect informal data citations in academic literature, and develops metrics to track the impact of data curation. She holds a Ph.D. in Geography from UC Santa Barbara.