Today is our very last site visit of the program at the Data Archive and Network Services (DANS). DANS is located in Den Haag, just around 25 minutes from Delft by train. DANS is part of the Institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy and the Dutch Research Organization.They strive to provide permanent access to digital research resources through several different kinds of databases. Their main roles include archival support, software and database engineering, and innovation and research support and communities support through things like SSH access keys. They highlight that they are not a research or educational institute and do not consider themselves a cultural heritage institute. Now, this is a site visit that I was particularly excited for since a lot of what we were going to be talking about was coding and data based.
Our first guest speaker of the day was Andrea Charnhort who lectured on the dilemmas of a research data archive. Charnhort has her Masters in physics and a PhD in the psychology of science. Some of her research focuses on data visualization as a means to understand how users are jumping around different scientific general publications. The research tries to understand how users move from reading academic resources on one scientific topic to reading resources on another scientific topic and understanding how these topics are linked.
An important thing to note is that DANS uses a very traditional definition of scientific research than includes all academic subjects such as the humanities in the definition of scientific research.
DANS supports something called EASY that was founded in 2005 that allows users to add data to the archive that provides permanent access to the published research data. In 2005 when this was founded, it was considered a radical new technology, but in 2019 this kind of data basing technology is considered very standard. Since the Netherlands is a fairly small country, they utilize data manages to help control what is published and the metadata, or in other words descriptions and keywords, that are associated with the published data. The second system that is utilized by DANS is called the Dataverse Network Project. In Dataverse, researchers may publish their research but maintain control over the content and what can be deleted, whereas the EASY system gives ownership of the content to DANS. Dataverse is primarily used by individual researchers and is centered around research findingS rather than just the research data.
The third system that DANS supports is called Narcis, which is a gateway to scholarly information in the Netherlands. The ultimate goal of the program is to combine both the functions of EASY and the Dataverse Network Project. This would essentially combine databases of research data and research findings into a single, accessible portal. Another thing that is really important about this portal is that it allows the archive a way to track how many publications are tagged as open access. As we talked a little bit about this in class, open access means that these publications are free and do not require a subscription to the journal they are published in.
Our second guest speaker of the day, who was personally my favorite, lectured on scholarly communication on the web. To put it in simpler terms, he talked a lot about the coding strategies behind keeping things linked in academic papers linked to the correct links. This means creating some form of a correspondence table that allows DOIs to be assigned to each link to better keep track of links that move. They were also concerned with tracking something called content drift, which essentially means that when a reader clicks on a link, they have no way of knowing what has changed on the link from its original state. In terms of tracking content drift, they have developed a system that saves the original URI, a snapshot of the URI and a date and time stamp for the snapshot. This allows them to see the original state of the URI at a specific time and date and compare it to the current state of the URI to better track this content drift.
I think out of the entire program, DANS was my favorite site visit. I love hearing about the more technological side of libraries and archives since that is a lot of what my major deals with in terms of coding. The topic that our second guest speaker lectured about, especially in relation to coding is incredibly complex, and the fact that he was able to explain it so that every single person in the room understood the process behind the actual code is truly amazing. He was a better lecturer than some of the Computer Science professors I have had at the University of Washington so far. I really appreciated how all of the guest lecturers today did their best to include all levels of knowledge in their presentation to make it engaging for every single one of us in the room.