CIRSS Seminar: Illinois Databank development preliminary report from Illinois Research Data Service

Heidi Imker, Elizabeth Wickes, and Elise Dunham of the Illinois Research Data Service will speak on the preliminary development of the Illinois Databank project.

Abstract: Set to launch in late May, the Illinois Data Bank (IDB) is a self-deposit public access institutional data repository designed to publicly host data produced by Illinois researchers. Members of the Research Data Service (RDS) team will present on the design challenges of working with the DataCite metadata schema, a brief summary of user experience and project management methods, and discuss future development goals for the repository. The IDB deposit system will be demonstrated and the RDS team is eager for feedback and comments from the GSLIS community. The RDS is a newly formed campus-wide service headquartered in the University Library that provides the Illinois research community with the expertise, tools, and infrastructure necessary to manage and steward research data.

Heidi Imker is the director of RDS. Prior to joining the Library, Imker was the executive director of the Enzyme Function Initiative, a large-scale collaborative center involving nine universities, funded by the National Institutes of Health, and located in the Institute for Genomic Biology at Illinois. She holds a PhD in biochemistry from Illinois, and did her postdoctoral research at Harvard Medical School.

Elizabeth Wickes is a data curation specialist for RDS. She is a MS student at GSLIS, where she completed coursework in data curation and analytics. She currently co-organizes a Python user group, is a Software Carpentry instructor, and has previously worked as the curation manager for Wolfram|Alpha.

Elise Dunham is a data curation specialist for RDS. She holds an MLS from the Simmons College Graduate School of Library and Information Science, where she specialized in archives and metadata. She contributes to the development of the IDB in areas of metadata management, repository policy, and workflow development. Currently she co-chairs the proposed Research Data Alliance Archives and Records Professionals for Research Data Interest Group and is leading the DACS workshop revision working group of the Society of American Archivists Technical Subcommittee for Describing Archives: A Content Standard.