Using an electronic lab notebook to deposit data into Edinburgh DataShare

Posted on 15 April 2014 by xrorymacneil

This is heads up about a ‘coming attraction’. For the past several months a group at Research Space has been working with the DataShare team, including Robin Rice and George Hamilton, to make it possible to deposit research data from our new RSpace electronic notebook into DataShare.

I gave the first public preview of this integration last month in a presentation called Electronic lab notebooks and data repositories: Complementary responses to the scientific data problem to a session on Research Data and Electronic Lab Notebooks at the American Chemical Society conference in Dallas.

When the RSpace ELN becomes available to researchers at Edinburgh later this spring, users of RSpace will be able to make deposits to DataShare directly from RSpace using a simple interface we have built into RSpace. The whole process only takes a few clicks, and starts with selecting records to be deposited into DataShare and clicking on the DataShare button as illustrated in the following screenshot:You are then asked to enter some information about the deposit:

After confirming a few details about the deposit, the data is deposited directly into DataShare, and information about the deposit appears in DataShare.

We will provide details about how to sign up for an RSpace account in a future post later in the spring. In the meantime, I’d like to thank Robin and George for working with us at RSpace on this exciting project. As far as we know this is the first time an electronic lab notebook has ever been integrated with an institutional data repository, so this is a pioneering and very exciting experiment! We hope to use it as a model for similar integrations with other institutional and domain-specific repositories.

Rory MacNeil
Chief Executive, Research Space

Standing on the shoulders of giants: Phonetics Recording Archive

Posted on 13 January 2014 by dgirdwo2

The University of Edinburgh’s proud heritage of academic and research achievements is underpinned by the calibre of the outstanding staff that have worked and taught within its walls.

One such individual of note was the late Elizabeth Theodora Uldall, a pioneering phonetician who spent over 30 years at the University. Elizabeth, or as she was more commonly known as, Betsy, came to work at the University in 1949, after postings for the British Council both during and after the Second World War. Indeed these postings and her subsequent academic work meant that by the time she came to Edinburgh, she had already worked on five continents.

The primary interest of her research was phonetics and at her time in Edinburgh made many valuable contributions to this field, both through her research and teaching, and a touching obituary was published in the Scotsman, when she sadly passed away in 2004.

The Data Library are very happy to announce that recently, with the co-operation from the Linguistics and English Language department, we were able to gather for preservation and sharing, some of the recently digitised research outputs from Betsy Uldall, David Abercrombie, and other distinguished researchers’ work into The University of Edinburgh Phonetics Recording Archive, mid-late 1900s collection on DataShare.

This collection contains five items, containing phonetic and linguistic research including the research outputs and recordings from Betsy Uldall:

Although DataShare was not available for University staff at the time of Betsy Uldall’s retirement in 1983, it would seem that right up until the end, she remained conscious of her responsibilities and the value of her work to other researchers:

“Betsy Uldall, spoke to me before she died asking for this archive to be preserved, and with your help it will be preserved and accessible to people who can use it. – Many many thanks”

We are of course very happy to have played a part in meeting her request, and that her research data is now available to all who wish to study and build upon it.

David Girdwood
EDINA & Data Library