A Student Perspective of the DASER Summit

by Beatrice Pulliam

Editor’s Note: Beatrice Pulliam was one of a half-dozen students from the ASIS&T Student Chapter at Simmons College who volunteered at the summit. Her report of the summit, shared with fellow students at Simmons, is reprinted here.

organized the Simmons contingent of I volunteers for the ASIS&T & NEA- SIS&T DASER Summit held at MIT. DASER stands for Digital Archives for Science & Engineering Resources. The ASIS&T SIGIScience & Technology Information Systems SIGISTI) and the Physics- Astronomy-Mathematics Divi- sion of SLA also sponsored the summit.

This day and a half conference cov- ered everything from the very techni- cally nitty issues of metadata and stan- dards and what goes into building digital repository systems to current data archiv- ing challenges faced by community data- bases used by the scientific community and current digital preservation projects. On the subject of metadata, the general sense is that we have a good handle on descriptive metadata issues but not so for standards dealing with provenance and other preservation. Interestingly, there were no archivists or records man- agement folks in attendance at the sum- mit. It would have been great to get that perspective. I wonder if there will be any crossover in roles as more digital library initiatives take off.

On the topic of community data- bases, there are over 4500 labs, for example, contributing data to The Arabidopsis Information Resource (TAIR) based at Stanford University. The Arabidopsis Thaliana is a small flower- ing plant from the mustard family and is an endless source for basic research in genetics and molecular biology.

Beatrice R. Pulliam can be reached at beatrice.pulliam@alumnet.simmons.edu

In this report I would like to focus on the keynote and wrap-up talk given on the last morning by Clifford Lynch, the executive director for the Coalition for Center for Networked Information (www.cni.or&. Lynch brought up some issues that will cut across all areas of librarianship, not just science and engi- neering, things definitely worth thinking about as we begin new careers as librar- ians or ramp up current skills for new responsibilities. He notes that we need to be more “thoughtful in thinking about what needs to be in place for digitized content in the way of management, dis- semination, continuity and preservation.”

Lynch led off with a general com- ment that most of us can agree with. These are innovative times in terms of not only the vast amount of technology that is available, but also in the enor- mous quantity of digital content that is being disseminated and our increasing reliance on its availability. A question Lynch asks us all to consider is the fol- lowing: How do we keep the content viable as we deal with its fragility? The scientists at the summit spoke with excitement about the community data- bases that are being built and the stresses of not being able to keep pace with the sizable datasets being added to the data- bases nor with the problems of data integrity. The scientists seem eager to work with information scientists. Some are already working in conjunction with their own “domain” scientists, informa- tion scientists, computer scientists and sometimes, behavioral scientists.

Lynch thinks that institutional repos- itories could be a possible solution

because the repositories are typically associated with an academic institution, its faculty and their interests. It might also be a future staging ground for fac- ulty research and the storage of data. MIT has already created its own open source institutional repository with DSPACE (www.dspace.org/). Other insti- tutions like the University of California and its e-scholarship repository have found success working with commercial entities that handle the access, editorial and policy issues and let the institution focus on the scholarly communication. Most of the panelists seemed to agree that standards, peer-review and resource sharing are very important, and open- source federations go a long way toward building a critical mass of content that leverages distributed expertise and pro- motes best practices. Working with librarians is on everyone’s list. A pan- elist even suggested that we “market our- selves by selling persistence” - persis- tent links, persistent access, even persistent digital caches. Tom Robertson from LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe; http://lockss.stanford.edu/ index.html) at Stanford sees the libraries as “memory organizations.” LOCKSS is working to build tools that help libraries preserve their e-content affordably.

Finally, Lynch cautions that tools will “permeate out across the literature and become infrastructure components” and that we shouldn’t “underestimate how bizarre it will get.” The bottom line, as Lynch says, is that we need to be think- ing through the “broad scale issues of curatorial stewardship as they apply to digital content.” Now.

Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology-AugustlSepternber 2004