Conference Report: IDCC 2016

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I had the privilege and pleasure of attending the International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC) last week in Amsterdam. At the conference, I presented a poster co-authored by myself and Ricky Punzalan entitled “Library-Mediated Data Curation Collaborations Examples from a National Library.” In this poster, we present findings from our work with the Knowledge Services Division at the National Agricultural Library. We use the four primary projects housed in the division to highlight the different ways in which the library collaborates around data curation activities.

There isn’t enough space in one blog post to talk about all of the sessions I attended but there were many highlights. Keynotes from Barend Mons and Susan Halford, the panel discussions, other posters..I could go on but here’s a link to the conference schedule. Instead, I’ll just give a quick synopsis of the best paper award winner, “Data trajectories: tracking reuse of published data for transitive credit attribution” by Paolo Missier. I saw Paolo’s talk which was excellent as well; in the study, he presents a model for tracking the credit researchers receive from data they generate. For example, how would you relate an original data object (a), its derivative (b), and a third object (c) which incorporates both (a) and (b)? Look for the forthcoming IJDC paper for a full explanation because I can’t do the study proper justice. This tweet I wrote during the presentation sums up the final slide. Paolo didn’t shy away from the confronting the challenge of translating this research into the world of practice.

In addition to presenting our work and see some of the , I really appreciated the opportunity to interact with colleagues from all over the world. I met and heard from curators, librarians, and researchers in the US, UK, Sweden, Switzerland, Germany…and those are only the countries I can remember! I returned to Maryland inspired to continue our work with the National Agricultural Library, exploring the intersection of data curation and agricultural research. Cheers!