[Rdap] Re-Post (With URL!) North American DDI Users Conference March 31 - April 2nd in Vancouver, BC

Carla Graebner cgraebne at sfu.ca
Mon Feb 17 14:17:07 EST 2014


Hi Everyone,

The first time I posted this, the conference URL didn't appear so, with apologies, I'm reposting this:

North American DDI Users Conference

http://www.rdl.sfu.ca/NADDI/

Research data management has become an important global issue as funding agencies, publishers, and disciplines increasingly require the sharing of publicly funded data. The Open Data movement treats curated data as a valuable resource available to support new research with the potential for new discoveries. Furthermore, the expectation that research findings can be replicated is pressuring researchers to make their data understandable and usable by others. Both the replication and reuse of research data are highly dependent on properly documented data. The Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) provides two structured metadata specifications for describing the content and context of data about individuals or organizations (microdata) in the health, social, and behavioural sciences. This community-maintained standard for microdata is internationally recognized as a best practice in preparing, sharing, and preserving data.

Interested in learning more? Please join us in Vancouver for the second North American DDI Users Conference , to be held March 31-April 2, 2014. Organized by the University of British Columbia, Simon Fraser University, University of Alberta Libraries, and the Institute for Policy and Social Research at the University of Kansas, the meeting will take place at the Harbour Center, Simon Fraser University, with the theme "Documenting Reproducible Research."

The Keynote Speaker for the conference is Ann Green. She is an independent research consultant focusing on the digital lifecycle of scholarly resources, including their creation, delivery, management, long-term stewardship, and preservation. Ann has significant history and experience with the DDI, serving on the original DDI committee in 1995 and coauthoring the first DDI specification.

The conference will feature training sessions on Monday, March 31, and an opening reception on the evening of April 1. Monday's training will cover an introduction to DDI in the morning and the use of DDI to document health-related data in the afternoon. Conference sessions focus on a wide range of innovative topics and projects -- from field-testing multilingual clinical assessments using DDI to chaining together existing DDI tools to documenting qualitative data.

We hope to see you there!


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NADDI 2014 has two half-day workshops on March 31st that will be of interest to health researchers wanting to produce better metadata to support their research.

Discover the Power of DDI Metadata
Jane Fry, Carleton University
March 31, 2014 Morning Workshop

This workshop is appropriate for anyone who is responsible for managing microdata of individuals or organizations and has wondered how metadata could streamline their research. A brief background on the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) metadata standard will be followed by examples of using DDI and of tools that will help you produce and exploit DDI metadata. The participants will be presented with different applications running DDI metadata that showcase the discovery of and access to research data. Producing DDI metadata from two popular formats (SPSS and Excel) will be demonstrated and the tools that subsequently exploit these metadata will be shown (NESSTAR and Colectica Excel). Finally, participants will be presented with a data lifecycle workflow example that illustrates how metadata production and research data management can be integrated. As an introduction to DDI, no previous knowledge of this standard is required. There will be plenty of time for questions. The examples in this workshop will be primarily related to health research.


DDI and Health Related Research
David Johnson, University of Kansas and Barry Radler, University of Wisconsin

March 31, 2014 Afternoon Workshop


This workshop will be a seminar with Dr. Radler and Dr. Johnson describing their use of the DDI standard in health-related research. This format will encourage plenty of discussion with participants. Dr. Johnson is a clinical researcher who specializes in cognitive and emotional processes that characterize healthy aging and dementia. In his research through the Center for Hispanic American Research Methods, Dr. Johnson uses the DDI lifecycle specification with a wide variety of data instruments, including Computer Assisted Testing (CATI), REDCap (both online data entry or email surveys), LIME Survey and its associated Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software (QueXF), or more traditional Paper-and-Pencil via PDFs. Dr. Radler is currently the data management director of the Midlife Development in the U.S. project, a national longitudinal study of aging that uses the DDI to develop web-based documentation. DDI is essential for documenting the dynamic and complex nature of this research and facilitates the understanding, use, and analysis of multiple inter-related datasets. Both speakers bring a wealth of practical knowledge and experience in applying DDI to clinical and longitudinal research data.

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Carla Graebner
Liaison Librarian: Economics and Government Information;
Data Curator and Digital Preservation Project Manager
W.A.C. Bennett Library, Simon Fraser University 
8888 University Drive, Burnaby, B.C. V5A 1S6 Canada
Email: cgraebne at sfu.ca 
Tel: 778.782.6881
Fax: 778.782.6926 





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