Library-Laboratory Collaboration for Research Data

Albert R. Mann Library and the Cornell Language Acquisition Laboratory (CLAL) are working to plan for a new model of collaboration between research laboratories and academic libraries to provide for effective description, discovery, and sharing of diverse types of research data across institutional and disciplinary boundaries while respecting individual laboratories' needs for local management of their repositories and access policies.

Through a Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) from the National Science Foundation (NSF), we are planning an infrastructure for preservation, discovery, and sharing of research data. The overall goal is for academic libraries to be able to provide a suite of services to maximize the effectiveness of a research laboratory's investment in preservation and description of data. Through documented best practices, and software tools based on a hierarchical interrelation of metadata through library-developed administrative ontologies, we seek to ensure that data described in ways which most accurately reflect their original research environments will be discoverable and reusable by others across related disciplines.

Collaborative Projects

Language Acquisition Data

Initial exploratory work centered around child langugage acquisition data which will require extensive digitization of analog audio and video data, in addition to the collection and preservation of highly detailed transcription data and project metadata, in order to be shared with other researchers in the disciplines of linguistics, developmental psychology, and neuroscience. Mann Library is also working with the Virtual Center for Language Acquisition (VCLA) to ensure that research recorded in the digital domain is maximally discoverable by the greater scientific community through initiatives such as the Open Language Archives Community (OLAC) and through a public research portal.

Ecological Data

In recent months the LiLaC project has begun work with the Upper Susquehanna River Basin Agricultural Ecology Program to describe datasets in Ecological Metadata Language (EML) and deposit the results in Cornell's DSpace institutional repository. A critical component of this endeavor is eliminating any redundant effort by the researchers, and ensuring that they do not need to learn esoteric details of metadata schemas or program interfaces. This project couples convenient open-source tools produced by the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Sythesis with library expertise and custom software to add additional services such as automatic repository metadata creation and a public research portal.