Author: Kara M Whatley

Kara Whatley is currently Head of Science and Engineering for the NYU Division of Libraries, a position she has held since 2014. She was previously Life Sciences Librarian and Head of the Coles Science Center at NYU’s Bobst Library. Kara holds a master’s degree in biological sciences from Texas Tech University, master’s degree in library and information studies from the University of Oklahoma, and a bachelor of arts in biology from Hendrix College. She is an active member of the American Library Association, where she held offices in the New Member Roundtable and the Association of College and Research Libraries’ Science and Technology Section. Her professional and research interests include mentoring opportunities for new library professionals, user behavior in virtual reference environments, and effective communication in libraries. Kara splits her time between NYU’s Bern Dibner Library, located in Downtown Brooklyn, and Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, NYU’s flagship library in Greenwich Village.

The Project Formerly-Formerly Known as DRSR

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other word would smell as sweet.” –William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

As all of you know we’ve gone through several iterations of names for this project. Our working title started out as “Digital Repository Services for Research,” but we always knew it wasn’t a name that we wanted to use for our end-users of the services we’re building and linking. So we moved on to “Research Cloud Services,” something we felt might work better as a name for public consumption. But that name never took off within Libraries or IT, and most of us went back to calling it DRSR or “DRSR or whatever we’re calling it these days.” Some branding work on the IT-side of our project helped us see that we don’t need to name the suite of services for our users– they’ll be more concerned with the individual services than with how all of the services work together. But we all need to understand these services as parts of a larger whole so that we might be better able to help researchers throughout the research lifecycle, so internally and when/if needed we’re back to DRSR for this project. No more name changes. We promise.

DRSR at the February 2017 TorchTech Share Fair

At the TorchTech Share Fair in February, we had the opportunity to present an update on the DRSR project. Here is our poster, which describes the many services that are part of this effort. The fair was very well attended, with participation from across the University, and many visitors came by with questions about our services.

DRSR Project Update for December 2016

The DRSR Project work continues to chug along! This month our work is mostly focused in three areas: mountable storage, researcher workspaces, and the FDA (Faculty Digital Archive).

Mountable storage and researcher workspaces are both part of our Service Band 2 and can be thought of as “working storage.” We’re working to get ready for a mountable storage pilot project, which will offer researchers:

Mountable network drives, available for researchers from their own computing environments
Fast, secure, shareable storage for in-process work, with some built-in applications
Connections to other parts of the storage environment, including HPC, workspaces, and publication environments.

You’ll be hearing more from us on this work in early Spring 2017!

Researcher workspaces, the second part of our current Service Band 2 work, will support individual and group work throughout research lifecycle and integrate with existing and future storage tools and applications. To that end, we’ve launched an institutional version of the Open Science Framework (OSF), which is now available via NYU single sign-on (SSO).

The DRSR project doesn’t only create new services; it also works to improve and connect existing services like our Faculty Digital Archive. The FDA is part of Service Band 3, our research publication environment, and it was recently upgraded to allow for easier use, uploads, and discoverability/visibility of scholars’ work on the open web. With this upgrade, the FDA now follows best standards for bit-level preservation and is file agnostic. It also allows scholars to comply with publication and grantor requirements on openness, data release and management, and persistent linking. When the DRSR project is complete, the FDA will connect to other parts of the storage environment, including working storage and workspaces.

Upcoming DRSR Brown Bag Lunch

Please mark your calendars for an upcoming brown bag lunch update and discussion of the DRSR project. The brown bag lunch will be Thursday, November 17th from 12:00-1:30pm in the Avery Room (Bobst Library, 2nd floor in the Avery Fisher Center.)

DRSR is a joint Libraries-IT project that is working to create central repository services that address the needs of NYU researchers and librarians with with respect to the research data lifecycle. The project has been underway for just over a year, and you may have heard updates about the project at several meetings in the spring or at a Digital Infrastructure Roadshow over the summer. We thought a fall update with an informal setting that allows lots of questions and answers might be a good idea!

We’ll provide soft drinks and cookies to complement your brown bag lunch.

Project Overview

Let’s Start at the Very Beginning, a Very Good Place to Start

This project began with the Next Generation Repository Planning Project, launched in December 2014 as a collaboration between IT and Libraries. That project’s primary goal was to create a roadmap for central repository services at NYU by studying the national landscape to see how other institutions are addressing the needs of researchers and librarians with respect to the research data lifecycle, and learning about the latest approaches being employed and explored from a technological and organizational perspective. This planning work was completed in July 2015, and it informs our approach to the Digital Repository Services for Research Project.

Why Repository Services? Why Now?

Providing support services for NYU research is a key responsibility for the Libraries and IT. High-quality infrastructure services enable scholars to focus on the research work itself. In scientific and humanities research, there are growing needs for storing, moving, finding, sharing, and accessing digital assets. The research process moves through a series of sequentially related stages or phases – outlined in the chart below – in which information is produced, processed and shared. In recent years, the amount of information has been growing exponentially.

Research Data Lifecycle figure

Figure created by Vicky Steeves, New York University

The lines between circles represent the transitions that occur in research as work is finished and passed to the next stage. (Note: The term “data” here is used generally for any digital content that serves as raw material for research.) It is critical for the institution to support each stage of the lifecycle and to facilitate the transitions between stages for maximum use and impact.

NYU’s commitment to growth as a research institution, coupled with the growing data needs in the research process, drives the need to deliver strong services and support for storing and managing digital content within and between each stage of the research data lifecycle. By 2014, several internal and external changes had occurred that warranted taking a closer look at the existing support environment for research data within IT and the Libraries to assess the current state and evaluate how to improve it. These changes included:

Data sharing requirements for grant funding
Increasing numbers of granting agencies now require investigators to share the primary data, samples, physical collections, and other supporting materials created or gathered in the course of funded research work.
Data explosion, need for safe backup
With the huge increase in the amount of data used in research, large file storage and backup is a critical need.
Moving and sharing files
As data files become larger and more widely used, researchers are spending more time managing files (moving and sharing), often at the expense of focusing on their subject work. Improved integrated tools are needed to make these tasks easier and efficient.

Upgrades needed for existing repository services
Existing NYU repository services (e.g. Faculty Digital Archive and Spatial Data Repository) provide valuable functionality for preserving, sharing, and citing digital assets and for making them discoverable. However, the technology design of the current services cannot accommodate the expanding requirements for preserving and sharing digital content.

Growth in Libraries’ digital collecting
The Libraries’ digital collection is growing at a rapid rate. Meanwhile, scholars’ expectations for gaining access to digital materials quickly and easily are increasing.

Rather than addressing these issues individually, Libraries and IT teamed up to take a holistic view of the research data lifecycle in order to consider services and environments that are interconnected and would benefit everyone involved in these facets of research including librarians, professional support staff, technical staff and the researchers themselves.

Sounds Good, But How Do We Create That?

This project proposes the creation of an integrated model for digital repository services. In addition to creating a scalable foundation, the integrated model builds on existing strengths in our working relationship between Libraries and IT and offers the most robust service model. The core of this project is building a shared portfolio of four research-related storage service bands that are distinct from a technical perspective but will satisfy the needs of all dimensions of the research data lifecycle seamlessly for users. One or more of these four bands may encompass multiple end-user services, but they will be unified internally, i.e. each band will share an overarching design and will use a shared foundational infrastructure where possible.

Additionally the four service bands will be planned so they are interconnected from an architectural and support perspective. The end-user services within the four bands will be utilized by library curatorial staff in building collections as well as by researchers throughout all stages of their research process.

It is these services that will collectively be referred to as the Digital Repository Services for Research, or DRSR.

The four service bands will provide:

Temporary storage for data analysis requiring very fast access to data, including large files
A storage environment designed for ongoing activities
A feature-rich publication environment with preservation and curation options available
An environment for working with high security restricted data.

Where the Rubber Meets the Road: Working Groups

To develop these four service bands, we created four working groups. These groups will collaborate on determining the portfolio of end-user services that rely on each of Service Bands 1-4, and define the underlying infrastructure model for the bands. They will also deliver the following:

Architectural Working Group: determine the design of each of the four service bands plus the overarching design and interconnectedness.

Technical Working Group: make software and technology recommendations for fulfilling architectural design group recommendations.
Functional Validation & Prioritization Working Group: represent user needs to development teams, elaborate on functional specs, finalize requirements, recommend priorities, prepare for transition to live service.
Policy Working Group: identify policy issues and needs around each of the services. (Note: this work may feed additional requirements to the Functional Validation and Prioritization group.)

For more information on all the teams associated with the DRSR project, see Meet the Teams.

Welcome to Our Project Updates Site

“A great research university produces, preserves, and transmits new ideas, insights, and knowledge. Its basic research activities promote and nurture scientific progress, develop artistic and creative expression, and sustain an informed democratic society and its political life.” – NYU Framework 2031

This site provides information for members of NYU IT and the NYU Division of Libraries regarding the joint Digital Repository Services for Research (DRSR) project. Here you will find background information on this project, details of the project’s working groups, and regular updates on DRSR progress.