A new Oxford project: BRII

The Building the Research Information Infrastructure (BRII) is an innovative JISC funded project led by Sally Rumsey and Anne Bowtel that will make use of semantic web technologies to harvest data about research activity from existing sources in Oxford to re-use them in novel ways as well as to make them available to others. 

The data about research activity is also known as research management data (not research data!). Cecilia Loureiro-Koechlin, BRII Project Analyst, explains very effectively what these data are in her recent blog post. The BRII team will use existing data sources like the Oxford Research Archive or the Medical Science Division website, organize the data using RDF ontologies/taxonomies and develop APIs and web services that can enable the re-use of the data for other purposes.

   

Linking information like this about researchers' fields of expertise, projects, publications, roles, groups, collaborators, etc  has the the potential to impact how scholars identify their peers in particular areas and could empower them to establish new multi-disciplinary relationships which in some cases may help attract funding.

I see this project having strong synergies with research data management activities. In a way, research data outputs could be one of the pieces of information that could be linked to their authors, disciplines and publications, improving discoverability as well as providing additional information about the data. Moreover, the interviews I conducted as part of the scoping study revealed researchers' interest to identify who else in the institution handles the same types of data so that they could benefit from their experiences. Therefore, this type of research information infrastructure could help promoting best practice in research data management. One could also foresee, service providers making their existing services explicit in a similar form so that researchers can discover them more easily but this is certainly not within the scope of this project.    

In sum, this is an extremely exciting new initiative and I would highly recommend to keep an eye on the project's blog that will surely produce some stimulating material.

A bright future for research libraries

The Research Information Network (RIN) has just published "Ensuring a bright future for research libraries", a guide aimed at vice-chancellors and senior institutional managers to ensure that library and information services evolve in tune with researchers' needs. I participated as a member of the working group and it turned out to be a rather interesting and useful exercise.

The guide provides a framework of issues that need to be considered when developing library and information services. One of the framework headings curation, preservation and disposal includes a section on research data:

"cooperate with research funders, others institutions and specialist agencies in developing a coherent and comprehensive framework of services to ensure that valuable research data are managed effectively from the point of creation, preserved and made accessible to others."

A selection of good practice examples are also offered and the LSE Data Library features there as a research support service that establishes close connections between library and researchers.

Data Librarianship

My colleague Stuart Macdonald, Edinburgh University Data Library, and I were interviewed last year by CILIP's editor Elspeth Hyams. The interview focused on our roles as Data Librarians and the emerging need of Librarians to participate in the active curation of research data.

The interview is available at:

http://www.cilip.org.uk/publications/updatemagazine/archive/archive2008/june/Interview+with+Macdonald+and+Martinez-Uribe.htm