During this week, I focused on completing the full version of the project paper. In particular, since I had already drafted the “Introduction” and the “Background/Rationale” sections of the paper during Week 2 and my mentors and I had discussed and recorded key notes consistently throughout the project, I was able to leverage the information that we had already documented for the content of the remaining sections of the paper (Methodology, Results, Discussion, Future Work, and Conclusion). Overall, I found the paper writing process to be a great way for me to reflect on the project as a whole. As I planned and structured the paper, the process allowed me to review the steps I had taken and the major lessons I had learned. One challenge that I encountered, however, was determining how to demonstrate that our project process was iterative. In other words, I was uncertain how to organize the details so that the readers of the paper would understand that while we had identified specific literature review topics for the project, the results of earlier literature reviews would guide our decisions regarding how to perform the later literature reviews. Likewise, the results from the later literature reviews would help us determine if we should revisit specific areas of the earlier literature reviews. With the current revision of the paper, I decided that I would place the descriptions and the corresponding results for the entire literature review process in the “Methodology” section. I would then focus on discussing in the “Results” section the actual tool we had developed as a result of all of the literature reviews. In addition, as the 12th International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC) (http://www.dcc.ac.uk/news/idcc17-save-date) was the initial proposal for the conference venue where we could submit the paper, I also prepared an accompanying abstract per IDCC’s requirement from last year. My mentors will be reviewing the abstract and paper this coming week, and I am looking forward to hearing their feedback.
Besides the paper and its abstract, I had also started the process of creating a poster for the project. The project should help the other DataONE members in understanding the project and its final output when the project is presented during DataONE’s All Hands Meeting later this fall. As I start Week 8, I am looking forward to working on and finishing the poster in order for my mentors to review and provide me with their feedback for the poster as well.