Data Issue of Science, February 2011

It has been a few months, but I wanted to review this: 

Explore the word cloud (PDF, 11 Mb)

In the 11 February 2011 issue, Science joined with colleagues from Science Signaling, Science Translational Medicine, and Science Careers to provide a broad look at the issues surrounding the huge issue of research data. This collection of articles highlights both the challenges posed by the data deluge and the opportunities that can be realized if we can better organize and access the data.

If you are on the Rice campus, access is here.

Science is making access to this entire collection FREE (simple registration is required for non-subscribers).

Data Sites I love

I just returned from the 31st meeting of IATUL. IATUL provides a forum for the exchange of ideas relevant to librarianship in technological universities throughout the world. Data was on everyone’s mind! It was amazing to see the work being done on DataCite, out of Germany, and also, ANDS, an Australian effort. These types of projects make datasets extremely visible. There is obviously still a lot of work to be done by subject bibliographers and collection development specialists to acquire datasets, and also, to work with faculty to make sure that datasets get deposited into institutional repositories. But I have a lot of faith that with deep collaboration, large amounts of data will become publicly accessible over the next few years. The recent NIH and NSF mandates make this work crucial. The Library wants to be at the center of a strategic data management plan! Hard work between Datacite and publishers, such as Elsevier, make sure that the user has easy linking from an article, to the publicly accessible data behind the research. Even if they don’t have access to the article, they will have access to the abstract, and to the data that supports the article. A recent research paper in NaturePrecedings has shown that 48% of open data received 85% of total citations, “48% of trials with publicly available microarray data received 85% of the aggregate citations.”

Libraries can incorporate this work into their local catalogs, and make data easily findable.

We will see lots of efforts around data curation in the next few years.  We are in a whole new dataland!

Data Sets/Data Curation

A lot of us have been thinking about data curation for some time, and some of us are just starting…I don’t want to even think about twitterarchiving! I have had a few links over on Diigo and am now thinking about where we find data. I came across this interesting page by a graduate student on where he finds data.  He lists University places:

DATA SOURCES:

• Data and Story Library – An online library of datafiles and stories that illustrate the use of basic statistics methods, from Carnegie Mellon
• Berkeley Data Lab – Part of the UC Berkeley library system. Hey, they’ve even on Twitter.
• UCLA Statistics Data Sets – Some of the data that UCLA stat uses in their labs and assignments.

It seems there must be more universities with public data banks.  I’m going to look for more.

Sources for Ozone Layer research

This week I'm working on finding datasests for research on the Ozone.

The official Website for information,
data, and images from the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI)
on Aura and the Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS)
instruments using Version 8 of
the TOMS processing algorithm. http://jwocky.gsfc.nasa.gov/ 

Stratospheric Ozone and Temperature Data from NOAA http://www.ozonelayer.noaa.gov/data/data.htm

The U.S. EPA, NOAA, NPS, tribal, state, and local agencies developed
the AIRNow Web site to provide the public with easy access to national
air quality information. http://airnow.gov/index.cfm?action=airnow.showlocal&CityID=105

And from the state of Texas:
http://www.tceq.state.tx.us/nav/main/air_main.html

You can highlight a location and get more local information here:
http://www.nws.noaa.gov/aq/sectors/conus.php

or, for Houston only:
http://www.nws.noaa.gov/aq/probe_aq_data.php?city=Houston&state=TX&Submit=Get+Guidance

Thanks to Esther Crawford, Department Head for the Kelley Center for Government Information and Microforms and Kim Ricker, GIS/Data Center Head, for the links!