Final Report on Bringing Yale Resources into the International Data Web
Prepared by William J. Wheeler and Ann Green
While the project we had planned did not come to substantive fruition, our project did have lessons for the kind of work in which we should strongly consider becoming more involved. We spent none of the SCOPA money allocated, but did quite a bit of research before terminating the project. It is important to stress that the participants benefited from the experiences and interchanges we had as we moved through the challenges of the project. Following is our final report which outlines steps we took, explains why we stopped, and makes suggestions as to how such projects could be accomplished at Yale in the future.
As stated in our proposal, we expected to work with unique data collections held at the Yale Economic Growth Center EGC. To that end, before preparing our SCOPA grant application, we checked with the EGC to see whether they were interested in the initiative we would propose. Receiving an affirmative, we proposed our SCOPA grant and proceeded to next steps. The first step in the process was to develop a detailed inventory and assessment of the EGC collection of data files. It was at this very early stage that we realized that using the EGC collection as the focus of this project proved to be more problematic then we had anticipated.
In three subsequent meetings with EGC faculty and staff, we discovered two problems. 1) Proprietary issues with respect to some of the data precluded it from being made accessible via the web-enabled data archive we had imagined. 2) Some data that might be usefully mounted in a web-enabled environment would have to be significantly reworked and documented at high cost to EGC staff. That is, some data were inappropriate and other data had been collected without envisioning the kind of archiving and access we proposed. Finally, a key player in our group who was primarily responsible for the inventory and assessment portion of the project, Data & Electronic Services Librarian Jocelyn Tipton, left Yale.
Lessons we learned from this project are that 1) proprietary and ethical concerns are a key stumbling block in mounting primary source data from individual's research on the web and 2) consideration for archiving and later use of data needs to happen early in the research process, ideally before research collecting begins, and 3) access restrictions and data dissemination activities are often under the control of the researcher or research group in which they were produced. We find that others have come to similar conclusions about the problems associated with archiving and recommend as a next step Yale librarians become more aware of this issue. To that end, we enclose a recent article that speaks to the importance of the partnering of data archivists and researchers. See: http://qualitative-research.net/fqs-texte/3-00/3-00humphreyetal-e.htm The exploration of these issues and the challenges they present was a strong outcome of this project for the participants.
The third step of this project, focused upon metadata tools and standards, continues to be one of deep interest to those involved in this project and others within the Library and AM&T. That is, we remain committed to evaluating the metadata tools, formats, and standards available for resource discovery of statistical materials. The project was successful in continuing this dialogue and clarifying the issues which we face in harmonizing access to statistical resources within Yale and beyond. A new project related to this is now underway between SSLIS and the Statlab to migrate the Social Science Data Archive to a new database structure using an element set compatible with standard metadata schemes in statistical resources, including the Dublin Core and the Data Documentation Initiative DTD (www.icpsr.umich.edu/ddi).
Respectfully Submitted February 2001
William J. Wheeler, Social Science Libraries & Information Services
Ann Green, Academic Media & Technology