It’s an exciting time for the Data Curation Network’s educational efforts! Just after our first Specialized Data Curation Workshop, held at DLF in Nov 2018, published the first wave of data curation primers to Github, we are excited to announce that the primer teams from our second workshop are halfway to completion! New data curation primers will be peer-reviewed this month and are expected to be published in early November. Learn more about the second workshop primers when the teams share out at a webinar later this month!

But first, an update from that second workshop which took place at Johns Hopkins University on April 17th & 18th, 2019.

DCN Instructor Mara Blake leads a group session with hands on practice in curating a geospatial dataset.

Thanks to generous funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), we were able to support twenty-eight attendees for our workshop at Johns Hopkins University. We engaged with professionals from twenty-one different universities, two government agencies, two archives, one museum, and one university student. Attendees were instructed by eight professionals from the Data Curation Network:

  • Cynthia Hudson-Vitale – Pennsylvania State University
  • Lisa Johnston – University of Minnesota
  • Mara Blake – Johns Hopkins University
  • Dave Fearon – Johns Hopkins University
  • Jennifer Moore – Washington University in St.Louis
  • Jen Darragh – Duke University
  • Susan Borda – University of Michigan
  • Wendy Kozlowski – Cornell University

There were two DCN IMLS Sub-Group administrators present to oversee the workshop: Cynthia Hudson-Vitale (Project Lead) and Hannah Hadley (Project Manager), both from Pennsylvania State University.

DCN Instructor Jen Darragh discusses the value of curation.

Attendees of our workshops learn from lectures that deep dive into DCN’s CURATED steps, hands-on group activities that explore curating a sample dataset, and live tool demonstrations. We also offer the opportunity for attendees to collaborate with other professionals by authoring data curation primers, which are community resources to assist data curators in adding value to a dataset. 

A third workshop will also be held at Washington University in St. Louis in November 2019, with primers published in 2020.