University of Alberta
Rethinking Long-term Value and Access for Historical and Contemporary Maternal, Infant, and Child Research Data
The University of Alberta Libraries (UAL) and Harvard’s Center for the History of Medicine (CHoM) have described and exposed maternal and pediatric research records to enable their long-term discovery, access, security, and reuse. CHoM has described special collections research studies, and UAL has described contemporary, born digital research studies by Women and Children’s Health Research Institute (WCHRI) researchers. The project seeks to close the gap left by current research data management practices, which often overlook data’s long-term and multidisciplinary reuse potential. CHoM and UAL will created metadata for research data collections and push discovery through Dataverse and other portals. As a result of the project, CHoM and UAL will also develop and distribute recommended best practices for describing research data for discoverability with both the special collections and current health research community in mind. This project is funded by the Council on Library & Information Resources with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
UAL Contact:
Sharon Farnel, Metadata Coordinator
sharon.farnel@ualberta.ca
Project staff:
Amanda Harrigan, Metadata Curation Specialist
Saurabh Vashishtha, Data Curation Assistant
Collaborators:
Kendall Roark (Purdue University)
Emily Gustainis (CHoM)
Amber LaFountain (CHoM)
Documentation
- UAlberta, Harvard libraries team up to bring hidden medical data to light
- Harrigan, Amanda, LaFountain, Amber, Farnel, Sharon, Novak Gustainis, Emily, Roark, Kendall, & Vashishtha, Saurabh. “Bridging the Research Data Divide” Presented at the North American Data Documentation Initiative (NADDI) conference, Edmonton, Alberta, April 7, 2016. https://era.library.ualberta.ca/files/bhm50tr81q#....
- Vashishtha, Saurabh, Harrigan, Amanda, Farnel, Sharon, Roark, Kendall. Automating Metadata Creation: Enhanced Discovery and Description of Maternal Child Health Data. Poster session presented at the North American Data Documentation Initiative (NADDI) conference, Edmonton, Alberta, April 7, 2016. https://era.library.ualberta.ca/files/6682x663w#.V...