Overview

Feel free to choose one or more of the activities below to pursue.

Read

Time estimate: about 15 minutes

Follow the links and consider the questions below each reading.

Higman, Rosie, Daniel Bangert, and Sarah Jones. 2019. “Three Camps, One Destination: The Intersections of Research Data Management, FAIR and Open”. Insights 32 (1): 18. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.468 (10 minute read)

What does this discussion raise in terms of how support services should engage with researchers?

King, Sara. 2019. “Translating technology: Infrastructure literacy for researchers”. Research whisperer. https://researchwhisperer.org/2019/11/19/translating-technology-rw/ (5 minute read)

Does this relate to your experience? How much should researchers know about research infrastructure? Would you like to share a story about learning something outside of your comfort zone?

Explore

Time estimate: about 10 minutes

Watch the first 10 minutes of ICPSR’s Sharing Restricted-Use Data with the Public video on YouTube.
Which examples of direct or indirect identifiers have you come across in data that you have created or managed? What questions do you have regarding definitions of sensitive data? Note: the audio is a little uncomfortable, but there’s a lot of information packed into the slides.

Do

Time estimate: about 20 minutes

GLAM Workbench is “a collection of tools, tutorials, examples, and hacks to help you work with data from galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (the GLAM sector)”.

It has an excellent introduction to accessing the National Library of Australia’s Trove database via its Application Programming Interface (API) using a Jupyter notebook in your web browser. This is possible thanks to the use of Binder, a technology for running Jupyter notebooks in the cloud.

The notebook uses Python, but no programming knowledge is necessary to work through the tutorial.

Use the Explore live on Binder button to launch a virtual environment on a BinderHub. Unfortunately, it can take several minutes to load, so this is an ideal time to go get a cup of coffee. Please be patient.

Once the virtual environment has launched, click on Your-first-API-request.ipynb to open the notebook.

A Jupyter notebook consists of explanatory text with a white background, and code blocks with grey backgrounds. To run the code, click in a grey code block and click the Run button in the toolbar.

When you are finished, you can close the browser window. Binder will automatically shut down after five minutes of inactivity.