Corrected: NSF Research Data Lifecycle Management Workshop, Princeton, July 18-20

I’m resending this, with a correction to the URL and a few other minor updates [Original posting has been removed -CNI News Editor].

Apologies. Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI

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National Science Foundation Funded Workshop on “Research Data Lifecycle Management” July 18 – July 20 2011 at
Princeton University, Princeton, NJ

We are pleased to announce the NSF funded Workshop on “Research Data Lifecycle Management”.

The objective of this workshop is to bring together researchers, campus Information Technology (IT) leaders, and library/archive specialists to discuss the topic of data lifecycle management specifically as it relates to computational science and engineering research data. This discussion will result in a common understanding of best practices and funding models for selecting, storing, describing, and preserving these digital data. The workshop will also help to cultivate partnerships between these communities to foster continued developments in the preservation and sharing of research data.

We now seek applications for participation and submissions of position papers for the workshop. In order to apply, please go to http://rcs.columbia.edu/rdlm and follow the links to register. The deadline for applications is June 20, 2011, but we will review and accept applications on a rolling basis.

Important Dates
Paper submission and registration deadline: June 20,2011 (but accepted and reviewed on a rolling basis) Hotel registration date: June 20, 2011
Workshop dates: July 18 – 20, 2011

Workshop Description

This workshop will bring together thought leaders on the topic of Research Data Lifecycle Management, including researchers, librarians, archivists, and IT professionals. Through the workshop program, attendees will be able to participate in the development of a data lifecycle management framework. By drawing together this diverse group of specialists, the workshop will be able to leverage the progress made to date by the digital curation, preservation and open repositories communities. The workshop will also promote the needed interaction, collaboration, and information sharing among diverse institutions and groups involved in High Performance Computing (HPC), research computing, IT, libraries, and archives. The goal is to develop a combination of policy and financial frameworks that ensures maintenance of important data over time scales longer than the career of any individual investigator.

On-site participation will be limited to a total of seventy-five leaders with balanced representation from the following areas: researchers who use computational resources to produce and access data sets; IT professionals involved in research computing support; and librarians/archivists who manage this type of data. In addition, video-conferencing will be used to reach a much broader range of off-site participants. We hope to engage a diverse population of researchers and professionals involved in research data lifecycle management to represent varying perspectives and differing institutions in the conversation.

We strongly encourage submission of position papers from people involved in the production, use, and management of data used in research computing. The papers will help to gather input from a broad community to seed the conversations at the workshop. The papers will also be used in the process to select individuals to participate on-site in the workshop. Position papers should be no longer than 3 pages, and can be submitted as described on the registration website any time from now through June 20, 2011, 5 pm EDT. Selection for participating on-site will be decided by a review panel on a rolling basis. Applicants will be invited to participate on-site within two weeks of successful receipt of a position paper, or by June 20, 2011 if not submitting a position paper.

This NSF funded workshop is a collaboration between the Coalition for Academic Scientific Computation (CASC) and the EDUCAUSE ACTI Campus Cyberinfrastructure Group, and will be hosted at Princeton University in Princeton, NJ, Monday, July 18 – Wednesday, July 20. The workshop will include an informal reception at the Prospect House, Princeton University’s faculty/staff club on Monday, July 18 at 6 pm. It will also include a dinner at Rats, a restaurant on the Grounds for Sculpture in Hamilton, NJ on Tuesday, July 19 at 5:30 pm.

The findings of the workshop will be described in a report written by the organizing committee and an invited group of participants. The report will be submitted to EDUCAUSE for publication and posted on the CASC website.

Please feel free to contact member of the organizing committee by email if you have any questions, concerns, or suggestions.

Best Regards,

Organizing Committee

Curt Hillegas, Ph.D. – Chair
Director of Research Computing, Princeton University
curt@Princeton.EDU

Rajendra (Raj) Bose, Ph.D.
Manager, Research Computing Services, Columbia University
rbose@columbia.edu

Kerstin Lehnert, Ph.D.
Senior Research Scientist, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University lehnert@ldeo.columbia.edu

Clifford Lynch, Ph.D.
Executive Director, Coalition for Networked Information
Clifford@cni.org

Oren Sreebny
Senior Director Emerging Technologies and Communications, IT Services, University of Chicago orens@uchicago.edu

Reports from NSF Cyberinfrastructure Advisory Group Task Forces Available

The final versions of the six reports from the task forces established by the NSF Advisory Committee for Cyberinfrastructure are now available. I’ve shared earlier pointers to drafts of a couple of these, but this page points to the final, “official” versions. The reports are here:

http://www.nsf.gov/od/oci/taskforces/

From the introductory material on the page:

In 2009 the NSF-wide Advisory Committee for Cyberinfrastucture (ACCI) established six task forces to investigate long term cyberinfrastructure issues:
* Campus Bridging
* Cyberlearning and Workforce Development
* Data and Visualization
* Grand Challenges
* High Performance Computing
* Software for Science and Engineering
These task forces were each led by ACCI members and their membership included a cross section of members from both academic and industrial communities. Over a two year period the task forces gathered broad community input via open workshops and meetings, solicitation of white papers, and other outreach efforts. Each task force subsequently discussed and generated a final report containing recommendations and ideas for advancing cyberinfrastructure in support of NSF research.
The recommendations of each task force were discussed in depth during the December 2010 ACCI meeting, and the final reports were approved by the ACCI on April 1st 2011.

Disclosure: I was a member of the Campus Bridging Task Force, and also contributed to the report on Data and Visualization.

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI

NSF Cyberinfrastructure Task Force on Campus Bridging

The draft report of the Task Force on Campus Bridging, established by the NSF’s Advisory Committee on Cyberinfrastucture in early 2009, is now available for review and comment. This is a substantial report that looks carefully at the interconnections between campus strategies and investments on one side, and national scale initiatives on the other. I’ve attached the announcement from the Task Force chair below, which provides more detail on the report and ways to submit comments.

Disclosure: I’ve been privileged to be able to serve on this Task Force.

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI

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To members of the US science and engineering research community generally, and the cyberinfrastructure community in particular,

In early 2009 National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Advisory Committee on Cyberinfrastructure (ACCI) charged six different task forces to make strategic recommendations to the NSF in strategic areas of cyberinfrastructure: Campus Bridging; Data; Grand Challenges and Virtual Organizations; High Performance Computing; Software and Tools; and Work Force Development.

A draft report of the Task Force on Campus Bridging is available for reading and for comment at http://pti.iu.edu/campusbridging/

You may comment on this document in one of three ways:
-Write a paper in response to this document that is posted pubicly on this web site
-Make a short comment that goes to the Task Force on Campus Bridging via surveymonkey either with attribution or anonymously.

We will finalize the document on 16 March, so please submit comments before then if you want them considered as the document is finalized. We will leave the opportunity to make comments open until the end of March. All comments sent via SurveyMonkey will be made available to the NSF.

A bit more about campus briding:

The creation of the NSF ACCI Task Force on Campus Bridging was a starting point led to a variety of efforts to collect community input on the topic of campus bridging. The web site http://pti.iu.edu/campusbridging/ brings together information gathered through several activities related to the general theme of Campus Bridging.

In order to define and specify its area of concern, we offer the following two definitions:

Cyberinfrastructure consists of computational systems, data and information management, advanced instruments, visualization environments, and people, all linked together by software and advanced networks to improve scholarly productivity and enable knowledge breakthroughs and discoveries not otherwise possible. [From the EDUCAUSE and CASC (Coalition for Academic Scientific Computing) joint report on campus cyberinfrastructure, "Developing a Coherent Cyberinfrastructure from Local Campus to National Facilities".]

And

Campus bridging is the seamlessly integrated use of cyberinfrastructure operated by a scientist or engineer with other cyberinfrastructure on the scientist’s campus, at other campuses, and at the regional, national, and international levels as if they were proximate to the scientist, and when working within the context of a Virtual Organization (VO) make the ‘virtual’ aspect of the organization irrelevant (or helpful) to the work of the VO.

There have been significant opportunities for community input into the creation of this report over the last two years. This is the first opportunity to see a full draft of the overall task force report, and will be the last opportunity for the community to comment upon it and help the Task Force improve it before it is submitted for consideration to the NSF ACCI.

Sincerely,

Craig

–
Craig A. Stewart, Ph.D.
Chair, NSF ACCI Task Force on Campus Briding
Executive Director, Pervasive Technology Institute
Associate Dean, Research Technologies
Indiana University

Papers on Future of Social Science Research contributed to NSF

Last fall, the Social, Behavioral and Economic Directorate of the US National Science Foundation issued a call to the community for papers describing opportunities for new research in the 2020 time frame as a way of informing NSF’s development of new research programs. We had a session at the December 2010 CNI meeting where NSF provided some initial summaries of themes from these papers.

The papers have been available for a few weeks at the NSF site, but I waited to announce them here until the summary file of all abstracts was available; there are a large number of papers and they are difficult to scan without such a file. There are some fascinating papers here.

The links to the papers and the summary file are at

http://www.nsf.gov/sbe/sbe_2020/index.cfm

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI

New CNI Conversations; Move to Podcast Only

CNI Conversations is now offered in a podcast-only format. The original conference call format has been discontinued (though may be used again in the future); instead, CNI Executive Director Clifford Lynch will provide periodic 20-30 minute updates on issues of interest to the CNI community beginning with the February 10, 2011 podcast. CNI Conversations continues to be available at http://conversations.cni.org/ (to subscribe to the audio feed add http://conversations.cni.org/feed to iTunes, or any podcatcher).

In the February 10, 2011 podcast, Cliff talks about the National Science Foundation (NSF) Directorate for the Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE) call for white papers that propose ideas for the SBE sciences for 2020. Cliff also discusses the 2011 Personal Digital Archiving conference, as well as issues surrounding e-books.

We hope you enjoys this program and we welcome your feedback. For questions or comments related to CNI Conversations, please contact CNI Associate Executive Director Joan Lippincott at joan.

Video of session on NSF Data Management Plans from 12/10 CNI meeting now available

The video of a well-attended CNI Fall meeting session on “NSF Data Management Plan Requirements: Institutional Initiatives” is now available on both YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/cnivideo and Vimeo at http://vimeo.com/channels/cni.  Serge Goldstein of Princeton and Scott Brandt of Purdue provided information on what their institutions are doing to support their researchers’ needs to include data management plans as part of grant proposals to the National Science Foundation.

In addition, you can find the presenters’ PowerPoint presentations and other materials on our meeting website at http://www.cni.org/tfms/2010b.fall/Abstracts/PB-nsf-goldstein.html .

I know many campuses are tackling similar issues and I hope can benefit from the work highlighted at our meeting.

Joan Lippincott
Associate Director, CNI

ARL Guide on NSF Data Sharing Policy

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has released a new resource for libraries supporting the recently revised NSF Data Sharing Policy. The Guide for Research Libraries: The NSF Data Sharing Policy, by Patricia Hswe and Ann Holt, is a set of Web-based resources that introduces and explains the policy. Hswe and Holt also offer advice for library professionals who work with researchers seeking funding and provide links to a range of resources that have been created by ARL member libraries and others.

The Guide’s authors are actively seeking information on additional resources libraries are creating. The Google group, ARL Data Sharing Support Group, has been established as a contact point for librarians interested in sharing and exchanging information on their efforts to advance and support researchers creating data management and sharing plans. Individuals can join the group by emailing http://groups.google.com/group/arl-data-sharing-support-group.

The Guide for Research Libraries: The NSF Data Sharing Policy is freely accessible at http://www.arl.org/rtl/eresearch/escien/nsf/index.shtml.

For more information, contact:
Karla Strieb
Association of Research Libraries
202-296-2296
karla@arl.org

CNI Conversations – October recording available

The podcast of the Oct. 22 CNI Conversations session is now available at http://conversations.cni.org/ (to subscribe to the audio feed add http://conversations.cni.org/feed to iTunes, or any podcatcher). During this session, CNI Executive Director Clifford Lynch discusses the NSF data management requirements, as well as the National Academy’s updated report on the future of higher education, Rising Above the Gathering Storm, Revisited: Rapidly Approaching Category 5, and ARL’s 2030 Scenario User’s Guide. Cliff also talks about other NSF activities (such as the Campus Bridging Task Force of the Office of Cyberinfrastructure), and archiving social media.

Associate Director Joan Lippincott discusses coordination between space planning initiatives and curriculum and learning objectives, and PKAL’s new program, the Learning Spaces Collaboratory. Listener queries have to do with the proposed budgetary cuts to higher education in the UK, and the organization The Quilt.

About CNI Conversations

CNI Conversations provides an opportunity for individuals from member institutions and organizations to talk to CNI Director Clifford Lynch and others; currently the events take place in audio-conference format. Questions and discussion are invited and encouraged. Real-time participation in CNI Conversations requires pre-registration, which is open only to those at member institutions and organizations; if you are interested in participating in CNI Conversations, please contact Jackie Eudell at jackie@cni.org. We plan to continue to make audio or other records of these exchanges generally available after the event.

For questions or comments related to CNI Conversations, please contact CNI Associate Executive Director Joan Lippincott at joan@cni.org.

NSF Data Management Plan Requirement Information

The US National Science Foundation has posted some material on the new requirements for data management plans. In particular, see

http://www.nsf.gov/bfa/dias/policy/dmp.jsp

which includes a pointer to the overall Grant Proposal Guide language on data management plans, a pointer to the NSF data sharing policy, and some additional pointers to specific requirements for individual directorates and programs.

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI

CNI Conversations – September recording available

The archived audio recording of the Sept. 14 CNI Conversations session is now available at http://conversations.cni.org/ (to subscribe to the audio feed add http://conversations.cni.org/feed to iTunes, or any podcatcher). In this session, Clifford Lynch discusses the Dear Colleague Letter from the National Science Foundation (NSF) requesting comments on big challenges and new opportunities for the social, behavioral, and economic sciences, and he reports on a meeting of the NSF Office of Cyberinfrastructure Campus Bridging Task Force, a group charged with examining the coordination between national level resources and investments made by individual campuses. Cliff also talks about the status of the UK data service and the Wolfram Data Summit. Joan Lippincott reports on the new EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) assessment project, Evidence of Impact.

About CNI Conversations

CNI Conversations provides an opportunity for individuals from member institutions and organizations to talk to CNI Director Clifford Lynch and others; currently the events take place in audio-conference format. Questions and discussion are invited and encouraged. Real-time participation in CNI Conversations requires pre-registration, which is open only to those at member institutions and organizations; if you are interested in participating in CNI Conversations, please contact Jackie Eudell at jackie@cni.org. We plan to continue to make audio or other records of these exchanges generally available after the event.

For questions or comments related to CNI Conversations, please contact CNI Associate Executive Director Joan Lippincott at joan@cni.org.