Dataverse Community Meeting
Boston College Dataverse was launched on April 19th, 2016 as the new data repository for researchers. At the second annual Dataverse Community Meeting at Harvard Medical School in July, Barbara Mento, Data/GIS Librarian presented an overview of how Dataverse was introduced to Boston College researchers.
Other presentations included the building of Dataverse repositories in Brazil, China, Canada, and Germany along with implementations across the U.S. The uses of these dataverses range from coordinating data with mobile health tools, archiving economic data, and teaching empirical research to archiving world historical data.
To provide just one notable example, the Center for the History of Medicine Dataverse, which is still in development, supports the Center for the History of Medicine special collections. This archive will include oral histories and associated contextual records for oral histories conducted with individuals who participated in the NIH Normal Volunteer Patient Program between 1953 and 1983. This data will offer a rich research environment for exploring clinical trials and how they were conducted and is an example the value of non-numeric data to researchers.
What was most impressive was the number of tools integrated with Dataverse, with more in the planning stages. In particular, BC researchers writing data management plans for proposals can benefit from this platform’s integration with the DMP Tool. Other tools that have been integrated into Dataverse, include PLoS, DataCIte, and R. They also integrate Harvard’s WorldMap and TwoRavens statistical software for analysis of deposited data.
Presentations from the meeting are available at the Dataverse Community Meeting website. If you have any questions about depositing data in the Boston College Dataverse, please contact dataverse-support@bc.edu
