Data Management

Wikidata is a global collaboratively-edited knowledge base created by the Wikimedia Foundation. It was launched in 2012 to contain structured data (in the form of linked data) for use in other Wikimedia projects like Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. This presentation will outline how Wikidata has been used in GLAM institutions around the world, how UVic Libraries has begun to integrate it into its archival and library metadata workflow, and discuss benefits and challenges related to Wikidata involvement.

Collaboration can be transformative and a key to future success, particularly for smaller libraries/memory organisations. Through collaboration and large-scale systemic design, Arca, BC's collaborative digital repository, creates equity across the province by putting an innovative discovery platform within reach for even the smallest organisations. Attendees of this panel session learnt about the transformative impact of Arca from BC GLAM sector participants who are using Arca to make their digital treasures searchable and accessible to their communities. They heard about the innovative collaboration models for Arca partnerships with the BC History Digitization Program and the Digitized Okanagan History Project.

Over the last several years, many academic libraries have engaged in institution-wide outreach efforts promoting the value of research data management and the importance of data archiving and sharing. A happy result of this work is that PIs leading research projects that are concluding are now bringing data archiving requests for well-managed research data directly to libraries. But much of this data has the potential to consume hundreds of terabytes of storage space – some from individual projects alone. These storage-hungry datasets require development in software, hardware, policy, and service so that these large digital treasures can be archived according to academic library commitments to strong data stewardship. We conducted an environmental review of select mature large-filesize data archiving services to identify services offered to research. We will share practices and policies for data archiving and an overview of the more challenging large data archiving scenarios facing academic libraries.