Brainstorms on the Horizon

Week 1 

June 13, 2012: Digging in

Today I really began digging into to my assignment by reading through the DMPtool, reading through the DataONE website to start to determine the user groups, and started doing a compare and contrast exercise between the DMPtool and DMPOnline, the similar service provided by the UK’s Digital Curation Centre.

I’m hoping that the stage I am in right now is, as my advisor Christine Borgman used to tell me when I was writing my master’s thesis, the stage of  ‘darkness before the dawn,’ because I don’t feel like I have really wrapped my head around everything well enough to make useful and helpful suggestions for how to improve the DMPtool.

I’ve decided that for the rest of this week, I will end my day by brainstorming ideas for ways to improve the DMPtool and also jot down some notes about something else I read that day that will help me to analyze the tool.  Today, I began comparing and contrasting the DMPtool to the DMPOnline.  I have nearly scratched the surface in this comparison, but I have already yielded some interesting points of diversion, so I think I will continue down this path tomorrow.

Brainstormed ideas:

• More personalization of the tool for each university
• Examples of successful DMPs in comparison to unsucessful ones
• Even if the successful plans aren’t displayed–the DMPtool should be able to know which plans are successful and which are not
• Multiple authors/editors for a single plan
• More connections/involvement with major domain specific repositories and also options for depositing data on each university’s campus

DMPOnline Compare and Contrast:

• DCC has project stages: 1) minimal plan for use at grant application stage 2) ‘CORE’ version which is developed at the early project stage and maintained throughout the project lifecycle 3) full plan which addresses issues of long-term preservation and access
• The grantee returns to the plan to supplement the ‘core’ and ‘full plan’ after they are awarded the grant for the information submitted in the ‘minimal plan’
• The key point here is that the grantee changes the status from ‘unfunded’ to ‘funded,’ this means that DMPonline has some way of know which plans have status changes and which do not, giving them more of an idea about which applications are successful and which are not.
• The way that researchers create plans is by ‘mapping’ based on questions answered rather than filling out a template of the plan.
• The DMPonline allows for multiple format options for exporting a finished plan
• Posted questions and suggestions from users

I will have plenty of time to ponder these points as many others, as tomorrow I am heading to Europe!  I am making my way to the beautiful coast of Croatia in Zadar, where I will attend the Libraries in the Digital Age (LIDA) conference and present on my master’s thesis research on the development of the UCLA Data Registry.

Stay tuned for proceedings from the conference, as I dedicated a small section of my presentation to the DMPtool– and discuss  how data management related tools are made more valuable when they are connected together into an information infrastructure.