Day on the life of a data librarian

Recently we met with some of the marine science researchers as part of our series of interviews with researchers in the Collaborative Research Network at my uni.

On one level it might seem that marine data is fairly straightforward in that data sharing is well established among marine researchers and the data is not particularly subject to some of the ethical concerns that are present on other disciples. However there are many complexities with the types of data, physical, digital and the instruments used to collect data.

Prior to the interview we looked into what data sharing and data solutions were available for marine researchers in Australia and this is a huge area, but here are some starting points:

There are many records of marine data on Research Data Australia provided by the Australian Institute of Marine Science, the Australian Ocean Data Network and others.

Australian Ocean Data Network  is bringing together publicly available Australian marine data from many sources including CSIRO, IMOS, the Bureau of Meterology, the Royal Australian Navy, AIMS, GA and the Australian Antarctic Division. The Australian Ocean Data Network runs the AODN Data Repository of actual marine data.

Later this year a Western Australian Node of the Australian Ocean Data Network (WA-AODN) is being set up and will be lauched in August 2012.

Another important player is the Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS), IMOS is a contributor to the Australian Ocean Data Network (AODN).

In Western Australia our university is a partner of WAMSI (the Western Australian Marine Science Institution) which is . WAMSI contributes to the AODN and they also have a lot of information about their appproach to research data management here.

So there is a lot happening in this space and before going along to the data interview it was helpful to have some knowledge of the area.