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This article was downloaded by: [University of Nebraska, Lincoln] On: 17 October 2014, At: 07:40 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Australian Academic & Research Libraries Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/uarl20 Managing the Soft Issues in E-Research: A Role for Libraries? Tom Denison a , Stefanie Kethers b & Nicholas McPhee c a Caulfield School of Information Technology, Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University , Caulfield East, Victoria , 3145 E- mail: b Caulfield School of Information Technology, Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University , Caulfield East, Victoria , 3145 E- mail: c Caulfield School of Information Technology, Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University , Caulfield East, Victoria , 3145 E- mail: Published online: 08 Jul 2013. To cite this article: Tom Denison , Stefanie Kethers & Nicholas McPhee (2007) Managing the Soft Issues in E-Research: A Role for Libraries?, Australian Academic & Research Libraries, 38:1, 1-14, DOI: 10.1080/00048623.2007.10721263 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00048623.2007.10721263 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &

Managing the Soft Issues in E-Research: A Role for Libraries?

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This article was downloaded by: [University of Nebraska, Lincoln]On: 17 October 2014, At: 07:40Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Australian Academic & ResearchLibrariesPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/uarl20

Managing the Soft Issues in E-Research:A Role for Libraries?Tom Denison a , Stefanie Kethers b & Nicholas McPhee ca Caulfield School of Information Technology, Faculty of InformationTechnology, Monash University , Caulfield East, Victoria , 3145 E-mail:b Caulfield School of Information Technology, Faculty of InformationTechnology, Monash University , Caulfield East, Victoria , 3145 E-mail:c Caulfield School of Information Technology, Faculty of InformationTechnology, Monash University , Caulfield East, Victoria , 3145 E-mail:Published online: 08 Jul 2013.

To cite this article: Tom Denison , Stefanie Kethers & Nicholas McPhee (2007) Managing the SoftIssues in E-Research: A Role for Libraries?, Australian Academic & Research Libraries, 38:1, 1-14,DOI: 10.1080/00048623.2007.10721263

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00048623.2007.10721263

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as tothe accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinionsand views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Contentshould not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sourcesof information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever orhowsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arisingout of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Anysubstantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &

Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

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MANAGING THE SOFT ISSUES IN E-RESEARCH: A ROLE FOR LIBRARIES?Tom Denison, Stefanie Kethers and Nicholas McPhee

Within Australia there is a growing interest in e-research and the use of cyberinfrastructure. There is also increasing recognition that the use of cyberinfrastructure is often inhibited, not by technical issues, but by so-called ‘soft’ issues, such as those related to work practices, intellectual property issues, the nature of research collaboration, and institutional imperatives. This paper reports on aspects of DART (Dataset Acquisition, Accessibility and Annotation e-Research Technologies), a current e-research project, specifically issues related to the broader questions of uptake and use of repositories by researchers. The paper concludes by discussing implications for libraries and for the design and promotion of repositories.AARL March 2007 vol 38 no1 pp1–14.

Tom Denison, Stefanie Kethers and Nicholas McPhee, Caulfield School of Information Technology, Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University, Caulfield East, Victoria 3145. E-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]

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In a study of changing research practices in Australia conducted for the Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST), Houghton et al conducted interviews and workshops with researchers from a range of

disciplines and institutional settings. Among their findings were indications that researchers in Australia ‘are operating in an increasingly institutionally diverse and interdisciplinary environment’ in which collaboration is widespread.

1 Almost

75 per cent of those interviewed reported working primarily in project teams, and over 50 per cent reported an increase in inter-institutional collaboration. They also found increasing demand for access to diverse sources of information, for access mechanisms that cut across disciplinary silos, and for access to, and management of, non-traditional, non-text digital objects, concluding that:

A new mode of knowledge production is emerging. There is increasing diversity in the location of research activities; increasing focus on interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary research; increasing focus on problems, rather than techniques; greater emphasis on collaborative work and collaboration; and greater emphasis on more diverse and informal modes of communication.

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Others have identified a need to access diverse data sources, specialist instruments, software and other analytical tools, sample populations for surveys and trials, and specialist skills that require high-quality network access to undertake data- and simulation-intensive research.

3 In this context the push to collaboration can be

seen as a response to complexity, increasing interdisciplinarity, and an increasingly problem-oriented approach to research. Such changes have driven the need for tools to support direct dataset access and a focus on the life-cycle of data, and on the role of repositories.

4

DEST is well aware of these trends and has been investing heavily in e-research infrastructure projects in recent years, having funded several projects through the Systemic Infrastructure Initiative (SII). Examples include DART (Dataset Acquisition, Accessibility and Annotation e-Research Technologies), the OAKLaw (Open Access to Knowledge Law) Project to develop new ways of dealing with copyright and intellectual property issues, the E–Security Framework for Research, ARROW (Australian Research Repositories Online to the World), and APSR (Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories). Together, these projects parallel significant research projects being undertaken by the National Science Foundation Office of Cyberinfrastructure in the USA

5 and the JISC

(Joint Information Systems Committee) program in the UK.6

The purpose of this paper is to outline some of the issues being dealt with by one of the DEST projects – DART – and to look at some of the assumptions that underpin both DART and the current thinking on e-research, in order to understand the factors that might impede its development. Given that much of the literature also focuses on possible roles for libraries in this new environment, particularly in relation to building and maintaining institutional repositories for research output and the promotion of that output, the paper will also consider current thinking in that area.

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THE DART PROJECT

DART (http://www.dart.edu.au) is a collaborative project, led by Monash University (MU) with partners James Cook University (JCU) and the University of Queensland (UQ). Its emphasis has been on providing support for the collaborative research process and on adopting a national approach to improving open access to the results of publicly funded research. Structured as a series of 27 interrelated work packages or research tasks, it was designed as a co-ordinated program of requirements analysis, software development, and policy and guideline creation that could provide proof of concept for a range of software tools to support e-science/e-research. The results are intended to provide guidance on how best to:

collect, capture and retain large datasets and streams from a range of different sources; deal with the infrastructural issues of scale, sustainability and interoperability between repositories; support deposit into, access to, and annotation by a range of actors, to a set of digital libraries which include publications, datasets, simulations, software and dynamic knowledge representations; assist researchers in dealing with intellectual property issues during the research process; and adopt next-generation methods for research publication, dissemination and access.

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To this purpose, DART has focused on three demonstrator projects in the areas of bioinformatics and X-ray crystallography, climate research, and digital history, the latter being chosen specifically to explore the data and information management requirements in the humanities and social sciences.

For example, the DART Crystallography Demonstrator has taken the form of a portal that will allow researchers to monitor sensor and instrument data in real time through a framework called JAINIS (JCU And INdiana Instrument Services), and will provide access to grid computing for computationally-intensive data processing and analysis. It will also possess useful features including file browsing, access, manipulation and storage, the ability to remotely monitor laboratory conditions through live camera feeds, to display statistics such as laboratory humidity and temperature in real time, to view three-dimensional models of crystallography samples that can be manipulated and annotated using collaborative e-research tools, and to submit publications to other repositories.

Overall, DART has focused on the use of digital repositories and the development of a range of tools to exploit them, the range of targeted services including not only access to computing power and software tools, but also support for innovative new forms of research outputs and exposure, for example:

complex documents that link source data and results to publications;

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the ability to provide other researchers with access to original raw data; and support for stronger authenticity, authority, and integrity of research, by providing the ability to validate results.

Examples of the sorts of tools that will be developed and promoted as an outcome of DART include workflow management/job scheduling tools interfaced with computing and storage facilities, tools to support the acquisition of data directly from instruments, annotation software, metadata support software such as a registry or support for automatic field population and validation, and tools to support the submission of articles to publishers and/or the creation of versioned datasets to accompany publications. The knowledge developed will feed into a subsequent project, ARCHER (Australian ResearCH Enabled enviRonment), which is to create production-strength versions of these tools.

This has required a focus on challenges in data lifecycle management, attribution and provenance of the full set of research outputs, but many intellectual property, access and security issues underpin the work. As noted in the following overview of current research, however, although the technical issues can be difficult to solve, it is generally recognised that it is the ‘soft’ issues, such as the cultural problem of motivating researchers to change their work practices, that are potentially more formidable.

This paper focuses on the findings of two related DART work packages that investigate these ‘soft’ issues, specifically in relation to the implementation and use of data repositories. The first investigates barriers to researchers using shared data repositories to store their own data and provide access to others, while the second attempts to develop guidelines for information management best practice by drawing on the experience of information management professionals embedded into research teams.

CURRENT RESEARCH

Much of the current literature on e-research deals with the issues raised by publication-based repositories. While these serve a different purpose to DART, their creators often assume that they will be used to host datasets or to facilitate access to computational tools. There is a blurring of definition and purpose, and so many of the issues raised in this context are also of potential relevance to DART and similar projects.

The first issue that stands out in the literature is the low rate of contribution to repositories by the academic and research communities. For example, a recent survey by Ware found that although there was steady growth in the number of publication repositories, an average of only 290 records per institution had been deposited in the repositories surveyed.

8 Bjork suggested a number of reasons

for this, including cultural inertia, lack of awareness of the importance of open access, lack of trust in institutional commitment to the long-term maintenance of repositories, and uncertainty about intellectual property rights.

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Workflow and time issues have also been identified as important. Woodland and Ng discuss the situation at Curtin University, which has two systems that report on publication and research activity. They found that, despite the interest of specific individuals, the general uptake by academics remained poor, and that ‘the inefficiencies of the system (PRI) repelled those users who could avoid the process… they tended to enter data on personal or departmental web sites, bypassing the University’s publication data system completely.’

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Others have suggested that research patterns are shaped by changing funding patterns and priorities and that, as existing evaluation and reward structures tend to lead to conflicting incentives, ‘establishing a coherent structure of incentives that operates system-wide will be an essential step towards providing more appropriate and cost-effective access and dissemination.’

11 Hoping to

establish one such incentive, Lawrence investigated patterns of citation within the computer sciences and found evidence of higher citation rates for open access publications.

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The findings on the publication of datasets for the purposes of assisting further, unspecified researchers – a strategy underpinning some of DEST’s thinking – are similarly discouraging. Anderson and Carlson, who developed a number of case studies in the area of e-research, found that as their project progressed, they increasingly downplayed the notion of community and of collaboration because these notions were not priorities in the minds of the researchers. Instead, they focused more on the nature of data and its e-enablement, placing increased emphasis on the life of the data, especially in the social sciences. In particular, they questioned whether the availability of collaborative tools in itself was enough to activate collaboration between the users of that data when so many other key factors – ‘active manager, shared vision, pre-existing relationships’ were absent.

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Anderson and Carlson also examined the increasingly common practice of funding bodies to require that grant recipients publish their datasets for the purposes of exposing methodologies, peer-reviewing of data, and instituting standards and audit tracks. They made the point that this ‘requires mechanisms by which data quality can be trusted once “disconnected” from their producers’ and that those mechanisms would need to be made explicit if they are to be trusted, even in the hard sciences. Anderson and Carlson’s over-riding conclusion was that:

two key assumptions that appear to underpin a number of discourses on e-Science are not supported in practice:

1. That knowledge can easily and straightforwardly be disembedded from its producers and original contexts to become explicit data for temporally and geographically distributed re-users.

2. That there is a binary divide between the ‘quantitative’ and ‘qualitative’ sciences in their approach to and ability to benefit from e-Science tools and practices especially in terms of data re-use.

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David examined the institutional environment within which collaborative research takes place. He noted that many of the technical challenges of creating an infrastructure for collaborative e-research stem from participating organisations protecting their respective interests by emphasising organisational boundaries, when a more effective strategy would be to construct a common ‘research space’ through prior agreements. Such agreements would need to govern a wide range of issues, including terms of access to and control over instruments and other physical facilities, the apportioning of scientific recognition, and the ownership of rights in collective work products. David also emphasised that, while solutions to these issues were quite tractable in the context of a collocated research team, they quickly become ‘dauntingly complex when collaboration is extended to a multiplicity of geographically distributed teams and physical facilities, each of whose members have contractual relationships as employees of, or consultants to, one or another among several different corporate entities’. He concluded that the challenge in designing legal arrangements for collaborative e-research is to construct agreements that are clear and determinative without damaging the trust and informal norms essential to the conduct of that research.

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In summary, the major issues affecting the uptake of publication and data repositories are identified in the literature as:

ownership of data;existing non-collaborative culture;reluctance to change workflows;ignorance of the benefits;lack of incentives;difficulty of adequately representing the context of data and so of sharing it meaningfully; andlack of resources.

METHODOLOGY

The approach taken for this study was based on ethnographic rather than quantitative method, and has involved in-depth work with selected researchers in order to produce recommendations more practically targeted at specific disciplines. That in-depth work has included a range of techniques, including the embedding of Information Managers (IMs) as participant observers in research teams. Specifically, one IM was embedded for approximately one day per week within a research team of crystallographers and one day per week with a team of climate researchers. Another IM was similarly embedded within a digital history project team. The role of these IMs was to observe researchers’ work processes, and in particular their data management processes, to understand their needs and to provide support where possible. This combination of techniques has allowed the collection of observational data about the everyday work of the researchers, while providing those researchers the opportunity to think about and voice their thoughts and ideas on data management. It has also allowed the trialling and evaluation of new procedures.

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For example, the IM embedded in the crystallography team was required to become familiar with the hierarchy, operation and functioning of the research team, and with the research area in question. Once established, the IM began to identify existing workflow processes and data management methods, and document them. These documents, together with regular conversations with researchers about their work, eventually formed the core of a series of data flow diagrams which represented the processes completed by the researchers when undertaking a project. Using these documents as a base, the IM identified bottlenecks and issues within the current workflow process, and provided feedback to the researchers and to the other members of DART. In the end, the documents provided a detailed picture of the way in which the research teams operated, providing both the DART team and the researchers with a greater understanding of the issues, the most desirable outcomes, and those solutions that would be the most feasible and effective to implement.

For the interviews, participants (researchers) were recruited through the networks of project partners at the three universities, with a specific, though not exclusive, focus on those working on the three DART demonstrators, that is, crystallography, climate research, and digital history. Researchers from other disciplines were also asked to participate in order to explore a broader range of research disciplines and the environments in which they operate. For example, researchers in medicine (in particular, researchers conducting clinical trials) were interviewed, as were others drawn from the disciplines of archaeology, history, indigenous studies, earth sciences, physics, electrical engineering, information technology, data communications, econometrics, and political economy.

In all, 15 interviews spanning 12 different disciplines were conducted at three Australian universities, between June and November 2006. They typically lasted between 60 and 90 minutes. Of these 15 interviews, six were with researchers that had no connection with DART, and nine were with researchers involved in the project – seven participating in the DART demonstrators, one contributing to another DART work package, and one contributing to both the digital history demonstrator and two work packages.

The interview guide used in the semi-structured interviews was based on the findings from a review of the literature and an analysis of DART objectives and strategies. Topics included:

background information on the researcher, research area and types of projects undertaken;types and sources of data collected, processing and analytic methods;current methods of data management, including issues of storage, security, version control, metadata and back-ups;systemic requirements, including ethics, contractual and institutional obligations, particularly with regard to restrictions placed on the (re)use of the data collected;perceived barriers to collaboration/data sharing within and across disciplines, and within and across organisations;

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knowledge of, use of and attitudes to shared data repositories;problems in current practice; anda wish list of technical and non-technical improvements and support for data management.

During the interviews participants were asked to describe their current work practices with regard to data management, their use of data repositories, the problems they face, and the kinds of solutions they would find acceptable. Where possible these processes were captured as an informal process diagram following the Co-MAP process modeling and analysis method, which in turn was used to guide the questions and capture further detail. The Co-MAP process diagrams focus on the interactions and information flows between the actors in a process. It is a technique used to elicit existing and future cooperation processes and is particularly geared to locating bottlenecks and weaknesses in such processes.

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Interviews were conducted face to face. In 12 cases audio recordings were made and later transcribed. Written notes were taken in the remaining three cases. After the interviews were transcribed, the transcripts or written notes and digital photos of the process diagrams (and the audio files, if requested) were sent out to the interviewees. The revised transcripts, notes, and process diagrams were then carefully analysed and the main findings extracted. These covered data management practices and issues, discipline-specific practices, policies, issues, and constraints with regard to data collection and management, data use and reuse, publication and use of data and publication repositories, and ideas for future data management. The draft findings, diagrams and analyses were sent out to the interviewees for validation, before undergoing further analysis to develop specific recommendations and to identify more general conclusions.

To better understand the environment in which researchers, and presumably repositories, must operate, a series of semi-structured interviews were also held with what could be considered systemic players – those involved in policy at an institutional level – whether it be due to their involvement in ethics committees, their overseeing of legal requirements, their involvement in institutional archives or information management policies or in implementing the Research Quality Framework. These were considered particularly important when attempting to understand not just barriers to local collaboration, but also to inter-organisational collaboration, especially across state borders. To the extent that research teams collaborate or source data from overseas, trans-national issues were also explored.

FINDINGS

Although a number of discipline-specific issues were identified by the fieldwork, the intention here is to focus on those of general applicability.

The first of these issues is control over access to data, which came through as extremely important. Almost regardless of the discipline, and almost universally, researchers consider that they should control their data. Typically, four levels of access are required: private; project/group access within an institution; project/

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group access across institutions; and public access. Issues such as providing access to other researchers, as opposed to the public, can only be considered once overall control is in place. Even then, most researchers have expressed a strong desire to know who would be using their data.

This desire for control of access to data has varying origins. These include the need to protect the intellectual property – and so the investment – in the research being conducted, particularly where the research may lead to a patent, through to the need to comply with ethical standards and with privacy requirements. For example, within crystallography, much research is either commercially funded or has a component of commercial funding. Researchers can be contractually bound to commercial interests to protect the research and so cannot allow competitors access to their data. This extends to ensuring that the data is held only on repositories physically within their institution. In some disciplines, this need for control also extends to any metadata associated with the research, as the metadata alone may be enough to tell competitors what they are working on. These issues become even more complicated where ethnographic research is involved, where ownership of the data might be seen to reside with the ‘subjects’ of the data, for example members of an indigenous community, rather than the researchers themselves.

Furthermore, perceived security of the data is seen to be just as important as actual security. Closely related to this is the need for the perceived trustworthiness of the system, as without sufficient trust in the technical reliability and stability of systems, researchers would not use them. This involves technical issues. For example, data validation is vital, in areas such as crystallography, where accuracy of the data ‘to the bit’ is a must. However, the concept of trust is far more complex. Trust in the technology alone is not sufficient: researchers also have to trust the organisation(s) that run such repositories, as well as their research community, to not misuse, alter, or steal the data.

17 In this context, too much automation

may also lead to mistrust of results, and the ability to manually undertake some automated tasks can be seen to be useful.

Researchers also consider it important that whatever is proposed must align with existing work processes and be interoperable with existing software systems and metadata schemata. One of the key factors contributing to this attitude is the fact that most researchers regard themselves as time poor, and will avoid non-core tasks unless they hold the promise of significant benefits. However, if new tools can be shown to offer significant benefits, then researchers may be willing to adopt them regardless. An example of this was provided within the crystallography demonstrator, when web-based software tools to provide direct access to instrumentation control and datastreams, connected to shared data storage facilities, were implemented. The benefits were immediate, and showed that if the usability of the system could be extended with labour-saving functionality accessed via a user-friendly discipline-specific interface, researchers would embrace it.

For those working on the digital history projects, portals were seen not only as key to managing data for researchers, but as reflecting key work processes

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between them and the communities they work with. Datasets are seen more as symbolic objects (representing artefacts, stories and memories) that take the form of multiple media types (oral and visual history). These qualitative datasets are rich by nature and it is essential that they be organised and presented in context. That cannot be done without proper annotation and metadata, nor can it be done without usable systems that are fully understood by their audience. Thus, the crucial task of organising content and placing it in context in order to provide meaning is clearly brought out in the social sciences but, as Anderson and Carlson point out, it is also central to the sciences.

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The final finding relates to questions of long- and short-term ownership of data and requirements for the archiving and curation of data, which vary according to discipline, institutional policies, legislative jurisdictions and funding arrangements. For example, medical data such as crystallography datasets must be archived for a fixed period of time, typically five years, and in climate research there is a need for long-term storage for trend analysis. The study found that such questions were of crucial importance to researchers when they were actually using the data – a finding closely related to their need for control over the data – but received scant attention once that need was satisfied. In terms of research practice, the curation of data and its long-term preservation were viewed as non-core tasks.

Overall, the results from the field confirm several important findings reported in the literature. They also revealed that researchers are overwhelmingly concerned with their own or their team’s work, and that the effective management of existing data and work flows is a dramatically more significant driver than notions of potential collaborative research or the long-term curation of data. These are not unreasonable attitudes and, if government and research institutions wish to implement new research frameworks, they will need to persuade researchers that there are benefits to be had, for example, by providing access to tools that fulfil the long-term aims of improving data management while being of immediate benefit to current research priorities.

IS THERE A ROLE FOR LIBRARIES?

There are many reasons why institutions may want to promote e-research and the use of cyber-infrastructure and repositories. These include the desire to showcase institutional research, to secure additional research funding, and to assist with marketing, all of which are closely intertwined. These needs, and the findings in relation to data management, have led many to question whether there could be a useful role for libraries in supporting e-research. For example, a study of researchers undertaken by the University of Minnesota Libraries found that the majority of data held by scholars was inaccessible to others and that:

the organisation and storage of collected print and electronic resources…are idiosyncratic at best, haphazard at worst. There is a general desire for improved assistance or better methods/tools of resource organisation for the individual scholar; and there is

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little thought given to the longevity, preservation, or accessibility of accumulated research resources due to constraints on time, funding, storage space, and lack of expertise.

The study concluded that the library was well placed to assist in resolving some of these issues and could also provide training in research methods, and activities such as developing scholars’ collectives, which could be useful in helping to make the library a focus for research activity and the perception of it as a source of research services and tools.

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In another study of academics and researchers, Foster and Gibbons reported that faculty assume that regular backups are made and that data is managed and permanently accessible, regardless of whether there is any basis for these assumptions. They also found that researchers want services and tools that facilitate collaboration, version control, working from different locations, making their own work available to others, and so on, but that they want someone else to take on these responsibilities.

20 This agrees with attitudes found during the

DART study. Researchers have a hierarchy of needs and, because they tend to focus on their immediate problems, others are masked until their more immediate problems are resolved.

Similar findings have led agencies such as the National Research Council to conclude that there is a role for libraries, and that many of their key functions can be expected to increase in importance. They consider digital libraries as key research tools, noting that they can facilitate not only the preservation of data, but also the integration of collections, and the organisation, discovery, reuse, retrieval, publication, and dissemination roles currently spread across many institutions. They note that the maintenance of provenance data and quality metadata become extremely important in this context, and that these functions are typically handled much better by libraries than by individual researchers. Finally, they suggest that information retrieval techniques will need to keep pace with the large and complex distributed databases currently under development, and that information professionals will require increasing technical expertise and training to play the role demanded of them.

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Such thinking is evident in a number of current projects. ARROW (http://www.arrow.edu.au), another DEST-funded research project, led by Monash University but involving other organisations such as the National Library of Australia, provides one example. ARROW focuses on the creation and maintenance of public repositories, and the curation and management of a wide variety of resources across many different institutions. For the implementation of the ARROW repository at Monash University, the task of data management and curation was placed under the direct control of the University’s library staff because it was determined that only library and information services professionals possessed the skill and experience necessary to maintain the repository.

A different approach is that taken by Purdue University Libraries, in partnership with ItaP (Information Technology at Purdue), who are developing the Purdue Institutional Repository to house, curate, manage, access and update locally

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generated research. Intended to archive and disseminate research for local, remote, current, and future communities, it does not use a centralised system, but has been designed as a distributed system that builds on the native interfaces and tools of information systems already maintained by researchers. Thus, the repository is more in the nature of a portal that provides a gateway for accessing research, and which harvests metadata and provides additional levels of description and linkages to a range of individual systems.

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Thus, as Wainwright notes, there are new opportunities for libraries23

and they are starting to take advantage of them. In particular, they are well positioned to take up leadership in the promotion of research conducted in their parent organisations through the establishment and maintenance of institutional repositories which can provide access to not only the usual range of published material but also to datasets compiled by researchers. The existing strengths of libraries, in managing and providing access to information and collections, have established their claim to this role. But it is not a role they can undertake alone: they will need to partner with others within their organisations who have strengths in designing and managing information systems, not only because those skills are needed for the development of repositories, but also because repositories themselves are just one component of an organisation’s information infrastructure, which could be expected to include a range of systems supporting activities such as teaching and learning, research, and personnel management, and must be interoperable within that framework.

CONCLUSION

This paper has reported on the findings of those aspects of the DART project that relate to the management of the research process and its outputs. It appears that there is a significant need for professional data management services and for improved software tools capable of supporting the management of e-research and the long term preservation of research data. Further, it would seem that, despite recognition of the importance of such activities, researchers in most disciplines are of necessity too focused on their own immediate requirements and concerns to be able to consider them adequately.

But do they need to? The evidence suggests that these activities are best undertaken at a systemic level. As such activities are also closely related to the traditional strengths of libraries, particularly in regard to questions of data management, retrieval and preservation, it would seem that there is a natural role for libraries in this regard. As discussed, however, it is unlikely that they can undertake that role alone. To take full advantage of the opportunities presented in the developing e-research environment, libraries will need to find partners that can provide them with access to a wider range of IT skills and improve the integration of their systems within the overall information architecture of their parent organisations.

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Soft issues in e-research

NOTES

J W Houghton et al ‘Research Practices Evaluation and Infrastructure in the Digital Environment’ AARL September 2004 vol 35 no 3 pp161–76.

ibid p173.

National Research Council Issues for Science and Engineering Researchers in the Digital Age 2001 at http://www.nap.edu/catalog/10100.html; University of Minnesota Libraries A Multi-dimensional Framework for Academic Support: A Final Report 2006.

E Wainwright ‘The Future of the “Research” Library in an Age of Information Abundance and Lifelong Learning’ AARL September 2005 vol 36 no 3 pp125–34.

http://www.nsf.gov/

R Heery & A Anderson Digital Repositories Review 2005 at http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/digital-repositories-review-2005.pdf.

http://www.dart.edu.au/DART_Bid_Document.pdf

M Ware ‘Institutional Repositories and Scholarly Publishing’ Learned Publishing 2004 vol 17 no 2 pp115–24.

B Bjork ‘Open Access to Scientific Publications – an Analysis of Barriers to Change?’ Information Research vol 9 no2 2004 at http://informationr.net/ir/9-2/paper170.html.

J Woodland & J Ng, ‘Too Many Systems, Too Little Time’: Integrating an Eprint Repository into a University Publications System VALA Conference 2006.

Houghton et al op cit p174.

S Lawrence ‘Free Online Availability Substantially Increases a Paper’s Impact’ 2005 at http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/lawrence.html.

B Anderson & S Carlson Entangled Data: Knowledge and Community Making in E (Social) Science: Research Report to the ESR Chimera working paper 2006-15 Ipswich Chimera University of Essex at http://www.essex.ac.uk/chimera/content/pubs/wps/CWP-2006-15-EDKM-Research-Report-to-ESRC.pdf.

ibid.

P A David Towards a Cyberinfrastructure for Enhanced Scientific Collaboration: Providing its ‘Soft’ Foundations may be the Hardest Part Oxford Internet Institute Research Report 4 August 2004 at http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/resources/publications/RR4.pdf.

S Kethers ‘Capturing, Formalising, and Analysing Cooperation Processes: a Case Study’ in Xth European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS) Gdansk Poland June 2002 pp1113–23.

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G Gans, M Jarke, S Kethers & G Lakemeyer ‘Continuous Requirements Management for Organisation Networks: a (Dis)trust-based Approach’ Requirements Engineering 2003 vol 8 no 1 pp4–22.

Anderson & Carlson op cit.

University of Minnesota Libraries op cit.

N F Foster & S Gibbons ‘Understanding Faculty to Improve Content Recruit ment for Institutional Repositories’ D-Lib Magazine 2005 vol 11 no 1.

National Research Council op cit p10; see also B Allcock et al ‘Data Management and Transfer in High Performance Computational Grid Environments’ Parallel Computing Journal 2002 vol 28 no 5 pp749–71.

Purdue University Libraries Distributed Institutional Repository: White Paper at http://dir.lib.purdue.edu/whitepaper.html.

Wainwright op cit.

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