Open Repositories 2010

[deborah]

You know it's a good conference when you've sent your coworkers countless caffeine-fueled e-mail messages that read I AM SO BRILLIANT LOOK AT MY BRILLIANT IDEA or WE ARE SO STUPID WHY DIDN'T WE THINK OF THIS BRILLIANT THING THAT EVERYBODY ELSE IS DOING. Or when you've made a blog post illustrating academic repositories as toddlers playing with a toy truck. I strongly suspect my coworkers wish I would lay off the café con Leche already.

I have this crazy WordPad document open full of notes and links, and I can't figure out which of them are e-mails to specific departments, which of them are notes for myself for further investigation, in which of them are totally awesome blogable exciting links to share with YOU, my loyal readers.


The keynote speech was about preserving scientific workflows, which mercifully is not something I think my department should be looking at yet. But talking about being formally compliant with linked data standards made me cringe at how much we aren't even thinking about such things. On the other hand, because of the way were using Fedora and encapsulating our various data streams, that would be relatively simple to implement once we decide to prioritize it. Which hopefully will be NOT NOW. (The post on how we take on far too many number one priorities can't happen right now because, oh, wait, way too busy.)

After the first general session, I ended up sending three consecutive e-mails to my coworkers saying, basically, "Wait, this would solve our Faculty Information System problem!" "No, wait, this would!" "NO WAIT THIS!"

I was very interested in what people have to say about dataset management, because that's one of the way-too-many-projects we are in the process of taking on. One thing I saw was how much work was going into making data flow directly from the lab or the desktop to the repository, with as much metadata as possible being automatically generated. I assume this is just to cope with the realities of how data producers work. On the other hand, right now most of the datasets I'm working with are humanities and social science data, and I'm not convinced the models map. Also, I wonder how these processes deal with field-collected and field-generated data?


I see two overarching themes of the conference: the first is Interoperability Is the One True Religion. No silo-like repository can solve everybody's problems. We are interdisciplinary and inter-institution, and we won't solve any problems and less our resources and data can be used by other tools, other resources, other datasets, etc. The second theme I see is Duraspace Helps Those Who Help Themselves. This is open-source software, and we all need to pitch in, and everything is going to be perfect in a modular happy world where everyone writes the tools they want and shares them in an open source community.

Comments

[libskrat]

You know you want to use BibApp. YOU KNOW YOU DO. *makes witching hands OF DOOM*

[deborah]

BibApp is on my wordpad document! It's one of the bullets which is "I didn't get to go to the session and I don't really understand what it is but clearly from the way people are talking about it will solve all my problems I have ever had and I need to read about it."

[libskrat]

Press release with examples of production installations.

We don't have one at MPOW yet, despite the original dev being here, BECAUSE WE SUCK. That will, however, be rectified this fall.

[sanguinity]

Aw! Happy conference excitement high! :-D


:: Interoperability Is the One True Religion. No silo-like repository... ::

Business is a different context from yours, but even business could use getting this religion, in my experience. One department's data has no way to talk to the data from the department down the hall. And even the big business enterprise system they installed couldn't solve it; it just created silos that were even harder to cross-access, despite all nominally having the same interface.

[lo_rez]

I fangirl this post like whoa.

That is all.

[libskrat]

Also, we can haz ur slidez?

[jeshyr]

How is it that I have not been reading your journal for EVAR?

Because I love all of your topics, and just read your last 20 or so posts and OK I do not follow all of the academia-related stuff (never heard of the apps you mention, for eg) but they were all interesting and every tag in your "Most Popular Tags" post is something I'm interested in except the few I didn't really understand - and I'd probably be interested in those too if I knew what they were!

So now I am subscribed to you :) Just in case you wanted to know.

Cheers,
r

[deborah]

it has now been months that I periodically think "geez, have I still not responded to rb posting at my journal? She's going to think I hate her!"

In any case, I'm really glad you're here. :-)♥♥♥

[jeshyr]

I'd totally forgotten about it and would certainly never think you hate me, but thanks for the reply. I'm really glad I'm here too and there's no need to reply to this one :)

r