In today’s technology-intensive research environments, petabytes of data may be produced in a matter of hours, days, or weeks. Those data may be lost in a similar amount of time if they are not captured, curated, and marked up in ways that allow for discovery and reuse by others. Datasets large and small can be very useful not only to researchers, but also to students, to the general public, and to policy makers. Among the classes of data of broad general interest are scientific records of the climate, the skies and galaxies, plant and animal species, social and economic observations, and cultural and historical records. Research policy by governments and funding agencies encourages – and increasingly requires – that investigators make plans for data management, curation, and dissemination. The National Science Foundation announced a new requirement in 2010 for all grant proposals: they now must include data management plans. In 2012, the White House initiated open access requirements on publications and data for all large federal funding agencies. Similar requirements are in place in the U.K., European Union, and elsewhere. These policies are causing a mad scramble for compliance by researchers, universities, librarians, and archivists. The library and archive communities have issued several reports on their role in data management, adding to a plethora of policy reports in this area. More courses and curricula for data management professionals are being developed. Data management is clearly a growth area for information studies graduates. These two courses (winter and spring) survey the rich landscape of data practices and services, including data as evidence and their role in research; data-intensive research methods; social studies of data practices; national and international data policy (e.g., intellectual property, release policies, open access, economics); comparisons between disciplines; management of data by research teams, data centers, libraries, and archives; technical standards for data and metadata; and data curation. Part I (winter) lays the foundation for data practices and services across the disciplines. Part II (spring) builds upon this background to provide practical experience in data curation. One large project will be undertaken across the two terms plus several smaller assignments. The courses will be graded separately. Part I is a pre-requisite for Part II. However, by taking Part I, you are not obligated to take Part II. These courses will be a mix of readings, discussion, practicum, field trips, and guest lectures. Invited speakers include local experts and distinguished guests, some via videoconference. Librarians, archivists, and other information professionals bring essential skills to the realm of research data. Information activities related to data include developing metadata, standards, and systems of classification, establishing archival plans for data selection, migrating data to new platforms and standards, creating finding aids for multiple user communities, and developing databases and technologies to support data creation, preservation, discovery, and reuse. Data management is a growth area in academic and special libraries, and will be an increasingly important set of skills for librarians and archivists in all sectors. This is an introductory graduate course, suitable for masters and doctoral students in information studies and in data-intensive research fields. The course is open to practicing librarians and archivists through concurrent enrollment, with instructor’s permission. Upper division undergraduates may enroll with instructor permission. The two-part sequence of courses in Data, Data Practices, and Data Curation was developed, starting in 2009, with contributions by UCLA doctoral students Jillian Wallis and Laura Wynholds. Student participation also contributes to the development and adaption of these courses. Thanks also are due to instructors of similar courses at other universities who shared their syllabi and course materials, especially Margaret Hedstrom and Ann Zimmerman of the University of Michigan, Carole Palmer and Melissa Cragin at the University of Illinois, and Carolyn Hank at the University of North Carolina.

Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, Tenth Annual Berkeley Law Privacy Lecture https://www.law.berkeley.edu/research/bclt/Video available at Berkeley's Box Channel.Two policy trends in access to data are beginning to clash, raising new challenges for universities and for individual faculty, students, and staff. One trend is for researchers to provide open access to their data as a condition for obtaining grant funding or publishing results in journals. The other trend is for universities to accumulate vast amounts of data about the activities of their communities in research, teaching, learning, services, and administration. Many of these data, both research and operational, fall outside privacy regulations such as HIPAA, FERPA, and PII. Universities are coming to see the value of these data for learning analytics, faculty evaluation, strategic decisions, and other sensitive matters. Commercial entities, governments, and private individuals also see value in these data; universities are besieged with requests for access. These conflicts pose challenges in balancing obligations for stewardship, trust, privacy, confidentiality – and often academic freedom – with the value of exploiting these data for analytical and commercial purposes. This talk will explore these trends, drawing on the pioneering work of the University of California in privacy and information security, data governance, and cyber risk.

The enthusiasm for big data is obscuring the complexity and diversity of data in scholarship and the challenges for stewardship. Data practices are local, varying from field to field, individual to individual, and country to country. They are a lens to observe the rapidly changing landscape of scholarly work in the sciences, social sciences, and the humanities. Inside the black box of data is a plethora of research, technology, and policy issues. Data are best understood as representations of observations, objects, or other entities used as evidence of phenomena for the purposes of research or scholarship. Rarely do they stand alone, separable from software, protocols, lab and field conditions, and other context. Concerns for data sharing and open access raise questions about what data to keep, what to share, when, how, and with whom. Open data is sometimes viewed simply as releasing data without fees. In research contexts, open data may pose complex issues of licensing, ownership, responsibility, standards, interoperability, and legal harmonization. To scholars, data can be assets, liabilities, or both. Other stakeholders in research data include funding agencies, publishers, libraries, archives, repositories, and universities. This talk will explore the stakes and stakeholders in research data, drawn from the forthcoming book, Big Data, Little Data, noData: Scholarship in the Networked World, MIT Press, January, 2015.

As the digital humanities mature, their scholarship is taking on many characteristics of the sciences, becoming more data-intensive, information-intensive, distributed, multi-disciplinary, and collaborative. While few scholars in the humanities or arts would wish to be characterized as emulating scientists, they do envy the comparatively rich technical and resource infrastructure of the sciences. The interests of all scholars in the university align with respect to access to data, library resources, and computing infrastructure. However, the scholarly interests of the sciences and humanities diverge regarding research practices, sources of evidence, and degrees of control over those sources. This talk will explore the common and competing interests of disciplines for scholarship in the digital age, concluding with a call to action for the humanities.

Research and practice in digital libraries (DL) has exploded worldwide in the 1990s. Substantial research funding has become available, libraries are actively involved in DL projects and conferences, journals and online news lists proliferate. This article explores reasons for these developments and the influence of key players, while speculating on future directions. We find that the term 'digital library' is used in two distinct senses. In general, researchers view digital libraries as content collected on behalf of user communities, while practicing librarians view digital libraries as institutions or services. Tensions exist between these communities over the scope and concept of the term `library'. Research-oriented definitions serve to build a community of researchers and to focus attention on problems to be addressed; these definitions have expanded considerably in scope throughout the 1990s. Library community definitions are more recent and serve to focus attention on practical challenges to be addressed in the transformation of research libraries and universities. Future trends point toward the need for extensive research in digital libraries and for the transformation of libraries as institutions. The present ambiguity of terminology is hindering the advance of research and practice in digital libraries and in our ability to communicate the scope and significance of our work.