Dear Colleagues,
The RDA Domain Repositories Interest Group held its inaugural meeting on March 27 at the RDA Plenary in Dublin. Notes from the meeting are posted at https://rd-alliance.org/node/1456 .(Thanks to Peter Doorn and Ruth Duerr!). The meeting ranged over a range of topics, and we would like to begin an email conversation to focus our activities. (Also, please subscribe to the Interest Group on the RDA website!)
There are two main ways that we can use the Interest Group. First, we can interact with other RDA Working Groups (WGs) and Interest Groups (IGs) to assure that our needs and perspectives are heard. RDA WGs must establish a need for their project, and they have 18 months to produce a final product. In many cases, the final products will be directly relevant to domain repository activities. For example, the Metadata WG has been discussing citations for dynamic data, and the PID WG has discussed attaching persistent identifiers to sub-sets of data. These are issues that affect some repositories. Also, the RDA helped to unite Databib and re3data.org, which were two separate directories of data repositories. They will now form a single directory, which will be maintained under the auspices of Datacite.
Second, we can propose working groups for ourselves or others. In Dublin, we discussed several topics of mutual interest: sustainable funding, encouraging data citation, and best practices for domain repositories.
There was also discussion in Dublin about the role that our IG can play in disseminating the results of RDA WGs. The first set of WGs will deliver their products and be disbanded at the next RDA Plenary in Amserdam on September 22-24. The leadership of RDA has begun to look to the IGs as a mechanism for dissemination of these results.
We should consider ways to communicate with each other and various RDA WGs between the RDA Plenaries. Since most domain repositories are unlikely to be represented at the plenaries, we should be thinking about other modes of communication.
Here are two specific proposals for discussion:
1. We can schedule webinars in which we invite WGs to describe their activities to the domain repository community. Webinars are easy to arrange, and they can be recorded for others to watch later.
2. We can hold an online discussion on some topic. For example, ICPSR has been working with professional associations and journals to improve the citation of data. We could describe our activities as a starting point for a discussion.
Would either of these activities interest you?
What other activities would be useful?
George Alter
Peter Doorn
Ruth Duerr
Bob Hanisch