Classifying Data Deposited by Scientists into a Library's Data Repository

Abstract

In 2014, a team of librarians at Brown University began a concerted effort to ingest, describe, and publish scientific data and digital scholarship into the Brown Library’s data repository, the Brown Digital Repository (BDR). The Library targeted outreach towards student, staff, and faculty researchers in the sciences to encourage them to deposit their digital scholarship, such as digital research products related to grants and data related to their publications, into the BDR. This poster presents a snapshot of the types of scholarship that were deposited by scientists during a 2-year period and classifies the nature of these digital objects. The authors looked at the total number of files deposited by scientists over this period and created a tool to classify and categorize these objects in order to characterize the nature of digital scholarship that scientists were depositing. The instrument classified these objects into several categories and subcategories based on concrete criteria. The first category described digital objects associated with a publication. Data in this category were further classified into the subcategories “underlying data” and “supplementary data”. Underlying data included files that contained the results reported in the publication, files necessary for the peer review of the paper’s reported results and/or necessary for replication or reproduction of research results, such as code that was used to analyze results. The supplementary data were files accompanying a publication, including tables, graphs or visualizations that were not able to be included in the paper or were referenced by authors. The second category was files created by student, staff or faculty researchers not related to a publication but could stand alone as scholarly products equivalent to a publication, such as research posters, animations, visualizations, or software. The last category described digital collections, and included three subcategories: legacy data, digital libraries, and grants. Legacy data were digital products published by retiring faculty or faculty nearing the end of their research careers. Digital libraries included the published collections of scientific data not associated with a single publication. These collections could be published by individual researchers, a collaborative team, labs, and/or departments, and their purpose is to make these items available for other researchers to access and reuse. Lastly, the subcategory grant data contained collections of scientific data and/or other types of digital scholarship associated with a funded-project. These collections could be published by individual researchers, a collaborative team, labs, and/or departments, and the purpose is to disseminate items resulting from sponsored research and/or make these resulting grant-funded digital objects available for other researchers and/or the public.