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D-Lib Magazine
May/June 2016
Volume 22, Number 5/6
Table of Contents
Editorial
Stewardship
Laurence Lannom
Corporation for National Research Initiatives
llannom@cnri.reston.va.us
DOI: 10.1045/may2016-editorial
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Libraries and librarians, at least the good ones, have always had a strong public service ethic. Acquire, organize, and provide access to materials appropriate to the type of library, as a public good. The onset of the digital age has changed this set of tasks significantly and made that public good both more difficult to provide and more important. This issue of D-Lib provides three articles and two conference reports, all touching on stewardship in one way or another.
The leading article, and the inspiration for the title of this small introduction to the issue, is "Scientific Stewardship in the Open Data and Big Data Era — Roles and Responsibilities of Stewards and Other Major Product Stakeholders" by Peng, et al. They take a close look at what is needed for long-term stewardship of data products and come to define stewardship roles in three areas: data steward, scientific steward, and technology steward. This is done in the context of environmental and geospatial data but is clearly applicable across other scientific fields.
Kelly and Fells, the authors of "Institutional Repositories: Home for Small Scholarly Journals?", draw on their experience in managing a subject repository to propose that institutional repositories would be good homes for smaller scholarly journals. Institutions with a strong presence in a given subject area could specialize in publishing smaller journals, especially those from academic societies, in that domain. As managers of one such subject repository, AgEcon Search, the authors are approached by journals that are not within scope of their repository, can rarely point to an appropriate repository, and so see an opportunity for under-utilized institutional repositories. Our third article, "Customization of Open Source Applications to Support a Multi-Institution Digital Repository Using DSpace" by Benchouaf, et al., give a detailed report on their work in customizing DSpace to work for their multi-institution repository. Eight academic institutions plus a university press migrated out of DigiTool to DSpace in the fall of 2015. They describe the selection of DSpace and the customizations made to optimize its instantiation and use across the multiple institutions, including identifier use, ingest, and ETD processing.
We close with two conference reports, The first, "Linking Publications and Data: Challenges, Trends, and Opportunities" by Mayernik, et al., reports on the "Data & Publication Linking" workshop held January 5, 2016 in Washington, D.C., funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation's (NSF) Open Access & Open Data initiative, and the NSF's EarthCube initiative. It is a detailed report that can also serve as a survey of the issues involved in linking among scholarly resources. The second report, by Morris, is that of the Sixth Annual DuraSpace Member Summit held March 2016, also in Washington. Among other topics covered at that meeting and described in this report is the potential merger between DuraSpace and LYRASIS.
About the Editor
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Laurence Lannom is Director of Information Services and Vice President at the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI), where he works with organizations in both the public and private sectors to develop experimental and pilot applications of advanced networking and information management technologies.
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