When we launched Research Workspace one year ago, we promoted the service as a place where NYU researchers can store and share their work. As early adopters of the service, Digital Library Technology Services (DLTS) staff have incorporated Research Workspace into our production workflows in order to transfer data between different repositories and from our repositories to end users. Below, we describe two examples of this transfer usage.
Research Workspace as a dropbox for submissions to the Faculty Digital Archive
Researchers from Courant Institute share large data sets produced on NYU’s High Performance Computing cluster through the Faculty Digital Archive (FDA), NYU’s institutional repository, managed by DLTS. The standard way to upload material involves manually downloading data from HPC servers and then manually uploading it to the FDA. This can be a cumbersome process for data sets which contain many files and are large in total size. A recent data set shared through the FDA contained over one million individual files. With Research Workspace, we are able to simplify this process. Research Workspace can be mounted on both the HPC transfer nodes and on our DLTS server. The research team from Courant moves their data and metadata into the Research Workspace mounted on the HPC cluster, and it is automatically packaged and transferred into their collection on the FDA. Currently, we have 80G dataset ready for upload.
This same mechanism could be used by other collection administrators who make regular deposits into the FDA. Individual admins could mount Research Workspace on a local computer instead of HPC transfer nodes and submit materials for the FDA.
Research Workspace for transferring digital materials to patrons
The DLTS preservation repository contains digital special collections materials which are available for use by researchers in the reading room. This material is transferred from the preservation repository to researchers upon their request. In order to perform these transfers, we mount Research Workspace on a DLTS server. The repository administrator copies collection materials directly into it. Staff then mount Research Workspace on a secure dedicated computer in the reading room and transfer these materials for patron use. With this new approach, we are able to save time and eliminate complexities caused by moving requested materials on external hard drives.
These examples demonstrate the value of mounting Research Workspace in a variety of environments in order to transfer data. The Research Workspace service team is available to assist others with similar use cases.
Click here to learn more about this service and to request a share.