"A centre of excellence in digital information management, providing advice and services to the library, information and cultural heritage communities."

UKOLN is based at the University of Bath.

Job Title

Institutional Support Officer

Contact Details

UKOLN,
University of Bath,
Bath,
BA2 7AY
tel: +44 (0) 1943 462917
fax: +44 (0) 1225 386838
email: m.duke@ukoln.ac.uk

The Job I do

I will be on maternity leave between August 2013 and August 2014. For any DCC queries please contact info@dcc.ac.uk

I am currently (2011-2013) an Institutional Support Officer at the Digital Curation Centre, advising Higher Education institutions in the United Kingdom on research data management, including policy and strategy. In this role I participate in meetings at individual institutions, help develop their data management policies, facilitate national meetings particularly within the JISC Managing Reserach Data community, and give presentations and write about research data management. I have a particular interest in the tools available to help with data management planning, data repositories, digital identifiers and metadata, data citation, discovery and re-use, which all follow on from my experience built during previous projects at UKOLN.

The DCC How To Guide on Data Citation, written with Alex Ball, is one of the most-downloaded resources at the DCC since its publication in October 2011. My introductory level article on personalization in Ariadne 28, "Personalization of Web Services: Opportunities and Challenges" continues to feature in the top 10 search results for Google for 'personalization' although it is now over 10 years old!

Previous roles and projects at UKOLN

Project Manager

Between August 2010 and September 2011 I managed the SageCite and Patients Participate! projects. As project manager I was responsible for the timely delivery of the project deliverables, project communication and dissemination. I also contributed to several of the work packages. SageCite investigated data citation for bionetwork models with Sage Bionetworks and the Taverna Team at Manchester. During this time I built up expertise on data citation, attending several international meetings and was co-author of two DCC guides. Patients Participate! conducted a feasibility study into the use of crowd-sourced methods for writing lay summaries of medical research. I obtained expertise in citizen science approaches and public engagement with science.

During this time I was also part of the team that delivered the Microsft Community Capability Model Framework project, which developed the ideas in Jim Gray's Fourth Paradigm on data intensive research. My contributions focussed on data intensive science and research in biological and health domains, open research, citizen science and data publications.

Software Developer

My previous role at UKOLN was to provide software development support for UKOLN's activities in the areas of resource discovery on the Internet, working within the Software and Systems team. This means that I worked with the latest Internet technologies and standards that support the description, retrieval and delivery of information on the World Wide Web, such as the XML-related family of standards (e.g. XSLT, SOAP), OAI-PMH and RDF. I wrote software and web applications to demonstrate the use of these standards to achieve interoperability as well as investigating and re-using existing tools and architectures.

I was a developer on the REPUK project (an aggregation service for OAI-PMH repositories in the UK) between 2008 and 2010. During this time I also worked on a BECTA report on digital identifiers

From 2003 to 2007 I worked mainly on the eBank UK project, demonstraing an OAI-PMH aggregator service in collaboration with project partners at the University of Southampton. eBank UK was an innovative project where I gained my first experience of data repositories, data linking and citation. The project partners at Southampton developed an instance of ePrints adapted to store crystallography data. Within the project we investigated the use of metadata schemas to describe the data sets and explored issues around modelling complex objects (data sets) within repository infrastructures, and the use of DOI identifiers to cite data.

I previously formed part of the team which maintained and developed the Resource Discovery Network (RDN), prior to its re-launch as Intute. In 2005 I evaluated the use of WSRP for the delivery of portal content, within the RDN and on the short-term JISC-funded GroupLog project.

In parallel to the technical work, I supported communication and project management activities at UKOLN, assisting in responding to queries from RDN users as well as reporting to funders, disseminating project outcomes (by giving presentations and publications) and maintaining project web sites. I gave an invited tutorial at the OAI3 Workshop at CERN in Geneva in February 2004. An updated version was delivered at the 15th Hellenic Academic Libraries conference in November 2006. I maintained sections of the JISC standards catalogue.

From June 2000 (when I joined UKOLN) to August 2003, I worked mainly on the IMesh Toolkit Project, developing tools for subject gateways, and developing a special interest in the topic of personalization. I was involved in a short term project developing an Ontology Server for Agentcities.Net from September 2002 until February 2003.

During this period I helped to maintain the Public Library People directory, an LDAP-based directory of contact information for UK public library staff. I was involved in developing a similar service for the Metadata for Education Group (MEG).

Further Information

More information, including a list of my publications and presentations can be found on my personal home page.