Spatial discovery and the research library

Abstract

Academic libraries have always supported research across disciplines by integrating access to diverse contents and resources. They now have the opportunity to reinvent their role in facilitating interdisciplinary work by offering researchers new ways of sharing, curating, discovering, and linking research data. Spatial data and metadata support this process because location often integrates disciplinary perspectives, enabling researchers to make their own research data more discoverable, to discover data of other researchers, and to integrate data from multiple sources. The Center for Spatial Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) and the UCSB Library are undertaking joint research to better enable the discovery of research data and publications. The research addresses the question of how to spatially enable data discovery in a setting that allows for mapping and analysis in a GIS while connecting the data to publications about them. It suggests a framework for an integrated data discovery mechanism and shows how publications may be linked to associated data sets exposed either directly or through metadata on Esri's Open Data platform. The results demonstrate a simple form of linking data to publications through spatially referenced metadata and persistent identifiers. This linking adds value to research products and increases their discoverability across disciplinary boundaries.3

Improving the documentation and findability of data services and repositories: A review of (meta)data management approaches

“…In general, the topic of metadata is strongly accented in geosciences. The description of an application accompanied by metadata is the most common one (Di et al, 2009;Ho et al, 2011;Maue et al, 2012;Zhang et al, 2013;Da Silva et al, 2014;Kalantari et al, 2014;Hu et al, 2015;Lafia et al, 2016;Palma et al, 2016;Reznik et al, 2016;McGee et al, 2017;Neumaier et al, 2018). Such papers mostly deal with an explicitly defined scope, like the integration of open linked metadata into cloud platforms, sensor webs, geovisual analytics, Volunteer Geographic Information, e-government, libraries for geo-resources, cartographic models, and Web services.…”

Chronotopic information interaction: integrating temporal and spatial structure for historical indexing and interactive search

“…However, the growth of the spatial humanities, the spatial turn in digital humanities and the history of sciences, has led to efforts to create large-scale databases of geographic references in historical documents [18,54,23]. Furthermore, spatial search has been proposed as a way of organizing and discovering scientific research objects [28]. A significant body of research has also focused on modeling locations with web text data, especially shorter microblog text, and ranking locations given a query [45,53,27,3].…”

Linked Data in a Nutshell: A Starter Kit of Selected Annotated Bibliography and Resources for Academic Librarians: Part One

“…It is only a beginning, and there are still many unsolved challenges, for example, the publication of MeSH RDF is not yet real Linked Data, and the decision on data modeling still needs more discussions. Lafia, S., Jablonski, J., Kuhn, W., Cooley, S., & Medrano, F. A. (2016).…”