Advancing Reproducibility Through Shared Data: Bridging Archival and Library Practice

摘要

At the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), a team of librarians and archivists is implementing a new biomedical research data archives and a data discovery catalog as part of Arcus, a multi-year strategic initiative of the CHOP Research Institute dedicated to making research data more broadly available within the institution. Arcus presents the Library Science team with the opportunity to develop new methods and solutions for addressing a number of important issues. This paper serves to highlight three areas of focus. First, archival appraisal methods will be used for CHOP's large-scale biomedical research data, which presents issues for quality data management and preservation. The Archives will employ expanded appraisal workflows to encompass strong selection and prioritization criteria before a collection is ingested, as opposed to current archival research data frameworks, which situate appraisal after a collection is acquired. Second, CHOP research data efforts will be organized as archival collections because they offer a framework for encapsulating research and mapping the relationships between a dataset, software, protocols and other contextual information critical to data reproducibility. Third, a custom descriptive metadata schema is being developed because archival item-level descriptive metadata doesn't address the complex discovery needs of diverse biomedical data. This will require addressing tension between archival arrangement and the item-level descriptive metadata required for discovery.