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12-14 November 2024, Costa Rica and Online

RDA 23rd Plenary Meeting (RDA P23) | Sustainable Science

Abandon, Replace, or Expand: Cultivating Global Ecosystems for Legacy Data

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SHARED DOCUMENT LINK:

https://bit.ly/4ewhWvk

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Agenda

Introduction and Context

Case Studies

Structured Group Discussions

Legacy data experiences – Successes, challenges, and policy gaps
Collaborative strategies and policy recommendations
Stakeholder involvement – Disciplines, institutions, local communities

Summary and Next Steps

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BoF Session Objectives

Further establish community needs for legacy data curation
Identify common challenges and best practices
Discuss approaches for extracting value and insights from historical datasets
Develop preliminary recommendations for policies and models of collaboration

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Legacy Data

Data collected in the past that is difficult or impossible for potential users to access.
Example - making print historical weather data discoverable in a database (Mayernik, 2017)
Especially at risk: scientific datasets created before or during the transition to digital technologies
“Old” data (can) = “new” data

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“Cultivating Equitable and Sustainable Ecosystems for Legacy Research Data”

IMLS National Leadership Grants for Libraries

Two-year project, collaboration between FSU and Indiana University

Legacy research data is data collected in the past that is often inaccessible to potential users but may be valuable for scientific inquiry
Research questions:

RQ1. How is the value of legacy data perceived and constructed across research and professional communities?
RQ2. Who is involved in legacy data preservation efforts?
RQ3. What forms of collaboration work best in curating and preserving legacy data?

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Motivation

2023 was the Year of Open Science
Many initiatives exist surrounding legacy data rescue and curation

Research communities
Library & Information Science

The project targets gaps in knowledge:

“Value” of legacy data
Training for legacy data curation and management
How academic and research libraries can best engage and collaborate with research communities

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Guiding Themes

Legacy Data for Open Science

Linking historical data to other research products and with modern research infrastructures

Sharing Equipment and Knowledge

Challenges and collaborations for working with specialized and antiquated equipment

Engaging Local Communities

International research
Research resources
Data colonialism

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Phase I: Systematic Literature Analysis

1,338 publications retrieved published in the last 15 years; 67 papers analyzed
Preliminary findings:

Legacy data efforts are global
Most effort is in the global north
Earth Science and LIS lead legacy data efforts.
Both data and metadata have value; human aspects increasingly important

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Engaging Students in Archival Education through Legacy Data Research

IMLS Project:

OER curricular materials for online teaching and learning

Building on preliminary efforts to integrate legacy data curation

Information Organization, Digital Curation @ Rutgers
Data Organization, Data Curation @FSU

Integrating themes and findings
Challenging for online environments

Broader implications:

Strengthen data curation education community
Research to practice and practice to research

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RDA and Legacy Data Initiatives

A BoF session at Plenary #3 co-led by a task group “Data At Risk” (CODATA)

Data Rescue IG (now completed):

Plenaries 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 – notes and outputs are 404

Data Conservation IG

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Case Study: Political Science / Economics

Elinor Ostrom’s legacy in the commons research, The Ostrom Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis
Artifacts:

Non-digital: Papers, correspondence, proposals, media and realia of Vincent and Elinor Ostrom

431 Boxes

Digital:

Common-pool resources database (CPR)
Forestry database (IFRI)
Irrigation database (NIIS)

Challenges

Some data maybe in the boxes
Databases are in older, proprietary formats
Databases exist in multiple copies across institutions
High historical value, but re-use value unclear

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Case Study: Astronomy, “Save-the-bits”

NOIRLab in Tucson, AZ
9,300 8mm Exabyte tapes, created by NOAO between 1993 and 2004

Observations at Kitt Peak (Arizona) and Cerro Tololo (Chile)
Each tape is a night of observations
Up to 4 million files

Data migration effort recently completed after years of effort

Working to integrate data into processing pipeline and fully archive with contemporary datasets

“Nobel Prize winning data” in the collection (Steffen & Hunt, 2022)

Steffen, J., & Hunt, S. E. (2022). Tapes and Papers: An Astronomical Heritage Archival Project of the American Astronomical Society and NSF’s National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory. Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 54(2).

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Would anyone else like to share an example?

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Discipline	Description	Outcomes
Social Science	Murray Research Center at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study: Data from longitudinal studies and surveys	At-risk data preserved by Data-PASS program through partnership across institutions
Astronomy	Digital Access to a Sky Century @ Harvard (DASCH): Large-scale project to digitize a century of astronomical plates; ~400,000 plates have been scanned so far	Numerous papers have been published using data from the DASCH archive
Weather/Climate	National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Library: Data extracted from historical print weather records; metadata profile developed for the collection	Data searchable through NCAR Digital Asset Services Hub (DASH)
Ecology	Vegetation survey plot data beginning in the 1880’s; data were originally identified in published texts and documented between 1975 and 1990, and again in 2015 to migrate the data to standardized formats	Publication and visibility of legacy data for broad reuse; case study of socio-technical challenges of legacy data migration and preservation over time
Geoscience	USGS Data Rescue: Funding data rescue projects in response to requests from scientists; funds distributed competitively, with only 9% of known need for requested projects satisfied by 2011	One-of-a-kind legacy observations systematically archived to serve expressed needs of scientists

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Discussion (~15 minutes)

Legacy Data Experiences – Successes, Challenges, and Policy Gaps

Theme: Legacy Data for Open Science

Sharing personal or institutional experiences with legacy data
What is the role of legacy data in open science and how can legacy data be integrated into modern research infrastructures, and what policy gaps exist?

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Discussion (~15 minutes)

Collaborative Strategies and Policy Recommendations for Legacy Data Curation

Theme :Sharing Equipment and Knowledge

How is the value of legacy data perceived across communities?
How should policies at various levels (local, national, international, institutional, etc.) address the perceived value of legacy data across communities?
What collaborative approaches best support equitable and sustainable curation?

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Discussion (~15 minutes)

Stakeholder Involvement– Disciplines, Institutions, Local Communities

Theme: Engaging Local Communities

How do disciplines, institutions, and local communities interact with legacy data, and what policies can make legacy data preservation less extractive?

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THANK� YOU

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