Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Data, Data Use, And Scientific Inquiry: Two Case Studies Of Data Practices, Laura Wynholds, Jillian Wallis, Christine Borgman, Ashley Sands, Sharon Traweek

Christine L. Borgman

Data are proliferating far faster than they can be captured, managed, or stored. What types of data are most likely to be used and reused, by whom, and for what purposes? Answers to these questions will inform information policy and the design of digital libraries.

We report findings from semi-structured interviews and field observations to investigate characteristics of data use and reuse and how those characteristics vary within and between scientific communities. The two communities studied are researchers at the Center for Embedded Network Sensing (CENS) and users of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) data. The data practices of …

Scientific Data Archiving: The State Of The Art In Information, Data, And Metadata Management, Kalpana Shankar

Christine L. Borgman

This white paper is the product of a one-year postdoctoral fellowship to study data archiving requirements for the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing during its first year of operation. The paper focuses on introducing current thinking on scientific data management issues and primarily on relevant standards in data description (metadata) and management for scientific archives. Appendices include a

rudimentary data dictionary for the current James Reserve database, and sample metadata crosswalks for Ecological Metadata Language (EML) and Sensor ML. This paper covers current standards, developments, and sources of datasets (where appropriate) for:

• General data management and discovery - tools …