There's more good news for ICPSR on the funding and technology front. I learned last week that our NSF proposal to the EAGER (EArly-concept Grants for Exploratory Research) program was funded. In the proposal, Shared Digital Technologies for Data Curation, Preservation, and Access: A Proof of Concept, we describe a series of objects (Content Models, Service Definitions, Service Deployments) that we will build as an exemplar on how one might store social science datasets and documentation in a Fedora-type repository.
We have been exploring Fedora quite actively since the release of version 3, and this is a wonderful opportunity to move our work from the wings and into center stage. The majority of our efforts so far have been focused more on transferring our legacy content (the keepsakes) from file-based storage into object-based storage, but the work from this grant will be much more forward-looking. This will be a chance to renew work on the early content modeling work I reported on back in May.
My sense is that between this grant and the NIH Challenge Grant, we'll need to look for a reasonably senior systems analyst/developer before the end of the calendar year. (We may even need to add two.)
Way to go! This sounds really interesting and looking forward to hearing about your work on this!
ReplyDeletebest, libbie