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This article examines issues faced by scholarly societies that are developing and sustaining online paper repositories. It is based on the AERA Conference on Online Paper Repositories, which focused on fundamental issues of policy and procedure important to the operations of online working paper repositories. The report and recommendations address a range of issues and offer recommendations relevant to disseminating scholarly knowledge online. It is meant to serve as useful guidance for scholarly societies that might undertake such an endeavor and for researchers and other readers interested in wider access and use of scholarly work. It also aims to be informative to authors who might consider placing their working papers in an online paper repository.

Exam period can be a stressful time for students, and having examples of past papers to help prepare for the tests can be extremely helpful. It is possible that past exams are already shared on your campus--by professors in their specific courses, via student unions or groups, or between individual students. In this article, we will go over the workflows and infrastructure to support the systematic collection, provision of access to, and repository management of past exam papers. We will discuss platform-agnostic considerations of opt-in versus opt-out submission, access restriction, discovery, retention schedules, and more. Finally, we will share the University of Toronto setup, including a dedicated instance of DSpace, batch metadata creation and ingest scripts, and our submission and retention workflows that take into account the varying needs of stakeholders across our three campuses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global COVID-19 pandemic has put into high relief the need for better remote communication and collaboration tools, but also serves as an opportunity to focus on building community capacity and promoting greater community agency in the language documentation process. This paper describes a method for remotely supporting and monitoring a language documentation project conducted by speakers, community activists, and/or academic researchers, through the use of a free and open-source data collection platform called KoBoToolbox. Rather than relying on access to audiovisual data, which are typically large and can be difficult to share remotely, the system is based on the creation of digital linguistic metadata with mobile devices linked to a secure central server, giving project leaders the ability to immediately access metadata as it is submitted, quickly generate summary reports and visualizations, and export metadata for further processing and archiving. The system is suitable for anyone who would like to integrate mobile metadata into a new or ongoing project and is able to provide the necessary training either remotely or in person.

Digital heritage portal interfaces are generally similar to digital library and search engine interfaces in displaying search results as a list of brief metadata records. The knowledge organization and search result display of these systems are item-centric, with little support for identifying relationships between items. This paper proposes a knowledge graph system and visualization interface as a promising solution for digital heritage systems to support users in browsing related items, understanding the relationships between items, and synthesizing a narrative on an issue. The paper discusses design issues for the knowledge graph, graph database, and graph visualization, and offers recommendations based on the authors' experience in developing three knowledge graph systems for archive and digital humanities resources: the Zubir Said personal archive collection at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, Singapore; Singapore Pioneers social network; and Polyglot Medicine knowledge graph of Asian traditional and herbal medicine. Lessons learned from a small user study are incorporated in the discussion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Academic libraries today are complex institutions with multiple roles and a host of related operations and services developed over the years. Yet their fundamental purpose has remained the same: to provide access to trustworthy, authoritative knowledge. Consequently, academic libraries--along with their private and governmental counterparts--have long stood unchallenged throughout the world as the primary providers of recorded knowledge and historical records. Within the context of higher education especially, when users wanted dependable information, they turned to academic libraries. Today, however, the library is relinquishing its place as the top source of inquiry. The reason that the library is losing its supremacy in carrying out this fundamental role is due, of course, to the impact of digital technology. As digital technology has pervaded every aspect of the civilization, it has set forth a revolution not only in how organizations store and transmit recorded knowledge, historical records, and a host of other kinds of communication but also in how users seek and gain access to these materials. In this article, the author discusses what the colleges and universities should decide about the function of libraries, about the space devoted to libraries, and about the roles of librarians. The author also notes that if these decisions are made wisely, the academy may be able to maintain much of the ineffable, inspirational value associated with academic libraries while retaining their practical value through altogether transformed activities and functions built upon a new mission designed for a more digital world.

This study discusses the importance of the DSpace open-source software that supports numerous digital libraries and repositories around the world. With the release of DSpace version 7, a natural question that arises is whether the new version offers enough new functionalities to motivate system administrators to upgrade. This paper briefly describes the most important changes, including new features and bug fixes, included in DSpace 7.4 and prior minor versions. The next parts of this paper explore our estimate that there are several thousand DSpace-based systems globally that will likely have to be upgraded in the near future. The main reason for this need is that older versions of DSpace (including 5.x) have reached the end of their developer support period or are reaching it in mid-2023. Based on our own upgrade experience, we propose suggestions and recommendations on migrating from the previous DSpace 6.3-based environment to the new one in a case study that concludes this article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last decade e-lecturing has become more and more popular. The amount of lecture video data on the "World Wide Web" (WWW) is growing rapidly. Therefore, a more efficient method for video retrieval in WWW or within large lecture video archives is urgently needed. This paper presents an approach for automated video indexing and video search in large lecture video archives. First of all, we apply automatic video segmentation and key-frame detection to offer a visual guideline for the video content navigation. Subsequently, we extract textual metadata by applying video "Optical Character Recognition" (OCR) technology on key-frames and "Automatic Speech Recognition" (ASR) on lecture audio tracks. The OCR and ASR transcript as well as detected slide text line types are adopted for keyword extraction, by which both video- and segment-level keywords are extracted for content-based video browsing and search. The performance and the effectiveness of proposed indexing functionalities is proven by evaluation.

In this paper the author compares the use of digital materials that have been deposited in The Ohio State University (OSU) Knowledge Bank (KB). Comparisons are made for content considered in scope of the university archives and those considered out of scope, for materials originating from different campus sources, and for different types of content. Results show that both mediated and unmediated content is used and therefore justifies the preservation costs for unmediated content. Results also show articles and undergraduate theses are most frequently used type of materials leading to the conclusion that it is important to collect content from all levels of the educational process.

Integrating advanced imaging and processing capabilities in libraries, archives, and museums requires effective systems and information management to ensure that the large amounts of digital data about cultural artifacts can be readily acquired, stored, archived, accessed, processed, and linked to other data. The Library of Congress is developing advanced digital imaging capabilities into effective preservation and verification tools as part of a larger scientific preservation study, processing, and research system for implementation by other institutions. An integrated hyperspectral imaging system provides a critical nondestructive tool for research into paper, parchment, photographic, and other objects within the Library and other cultural heritage institutions. This article addresses the implementation of this capability and appropriate metadata standards and the impact on the development and convergence of information architectures and systems in libraries, archives, and museums.

Stamp collectors frequently donate their stamps to cultural heritage institutions. As digitization becomes more prevalent for other kinds of materials, it is worth exploring how cultural heritage institutions are digitizing their philatelic materials. This paper begins with a review of the literature about the purpose of metadata, current metadata standards, and metadata that are relevant to philatelists. The paper then examines the digital philatelic collections of four large cultural heritage institutions, discussing the metadata standards and elements employed by these institutions. The paper concludes with a recommendation to create international standards that describe metadata management explicitly for philatelic materials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a strategy for the semantic migration of Portuguese National Archives records into CIDOC-CRM standard, an ontology developed for museums, within the context of the EPISA project. The approach to automatically populate the CIDOC-CRM is based on Mapping Description Rules to semantically translate the archives descriptive information into CIDOC-CRM representation. The compliance of the CIDOC-CRM model recommendations guarantees that the populated CIDOC-CRM ontology of archives descriptive information verifies interoperability, and could be linked and integrated with other populated CIDOC-CRM ontologies. In the information modelling, requirements on the mapping representation, due to the intent of interpreting natural language text to automatically extract information of metadata text fields and to interpret natural language queries, are taken into account. To automatically interpret the Mapping Description Rules, OWL API was used to obtain the set of assertions that represents the information in the target ontology and two datasets are available with some migration examples. The exploration of the knowledge representation is done through some Description Logic queries to highlight the advantages of having this new representation of the National Archives. The evaluation of the resulting representation can be done automatically proving its correctness for the metadata that has a direct representation in CIDOC-CRM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the production of a title-level list of British, Irish, British Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies newspapers (1621-2019) held by the British Library, and its potential for reuse and research. The data was extracted from the British Library's catalogue of over 24,000 British and Irish newspaper titles, cleaned, and published on the British Library Research Repository, an open access repository for the research produced by staff and research associates of the British Library. Bespoke versions of the data have been made available to specialist users, notably the British Library/Alan Turing Institute's 'Living with Machines' project, enabling greater historical analysis of nineteenth-century British news and selective digitisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper describes a pilot project to convert a conventional floristic checklist, written in a standard word processing program, into structured data in the Darwin Core Archive format. After peer-review and editorial acceptance, the final revised version of the checklist was converted into Darwin Core Archive by means of regular expressions and published thereafter in both human-readable form as traditional botanical publication and Darwin Core Archive data files. The data were published and indexed through the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT) and significant portions of the text of the paper were used to describe the metadata on IPT. After publication, the data will become available through the GBIF infrastructure and can be re-used on their own or collated with other data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Australian Federal Government's Office for Learning and Teaching (OLT) has built an important collection of learning and teaching resources for the higher education (HE) sector, a product of the many projects OLT and its precursors, including the Australian Learning and Teaching Council and the Carrick Institute, have funded over the past two decades. Although these resources are freely available on its website, the OLT considers them underutilised. Hence it has commissioned a project to reorganise the collection using more accurate and consistent metadata. This paper presents the results of the initial phase of the project, in which a new metadata schema for the OLT's repository was developed through a systematic analysis of the collection, users' and prospective users' search needs, and the domain of HE learning and teaching. While the methods used to develop controlled vocabularies, such as subject thesauri, are well established, there has been far less discussion about how schemas for describing particular kinds of information resource should be constructed. This article contributes to this discussion by showing how methods used to build controlled vocabularies can be applied, and combined, to the development of a schema used to support effective access to a scholarly repository of national importance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A substantial part of CLOSER (Cohorts and Longitudinal Studies Enhancement Resources, www.closer.ac.uk) is to electronically document over 100,000 questions from 379 instruments for use in a metadata discovery platform (MDP). The questionnaire profile of DDILifecycle 3.2 is the specification used by CLOSER. During the metadata ingest process, a set of four entry principles were developed to outline and protect the overall standard by which the metadata is being recorded. To supplement the four principles, a protocol manual is being organically developed, including real examples of procedure. However, there are situations where the entry principles conflict with each other and DDI-Lifecycle, therefore one or more must be broken in order to adhere to the more significant principles. This paper also discusses how the selected DDI profile (the use of Question Grids and Interview Instructions) and the tools used for ingest (CADDIES) affect the principles and methodology used to document the metadata. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces two digital prototypes, the Colour Collage and the Constellation visualizations, which we developed to represent eight pages from the scrapbooks of Scottish Poet Makar Edwin Morgan (1920-2010). We understand these prototypes as experiments within our research through design process, rather than as stand-alone digital objects, and so this article presents the theoretical pursuits and design decisions that motivated, and were motivated by, these prototypes. We begin by establishing our theoretical framework, which focuses on the roles of inscription technologies in archives and is guided by Bruno Latour's concept of a mediator (1993). We then discuss scrapbooks as polyvocal and hybrid mediators, which are nonetheless often pushed to the fringes of reading practices and material histories. In unpacking the fringe status of the Morgan scrapbooks in particular, we outline the copyright restrictions that complicate their digital publication. Reconceptualizing these restrictions as creative constraints, our prototypes experiment with forms of representation that go beyond the facsimile, drawing on detailed metadata and generating new visualizations that are inspired by the scrapbooks' materially-specific grammars. Our aim with these prototypes is to open the scrapbooks to new forms of play and discoverability in online contexts, while using digital tools and methodologies to better understand the scrapbooks' multifaceted modes of meaning creation. We conclude by discussing some of our prototypes' limitations, as well as future directions for our research through design process for the Morgan Scrapbooks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Funding acknowledgements in research papers are an important resource for studying the impact of funding on research, but also present a utility for mapping the funding landscape of a particular discipline, the portfolios of certain funding agencies, their co-funding activities as well as the research performance of scientists and their organizations. However, the usage and detail of funding acknowledgements in publications vary in depth and lacks consistency. As it becomes increasingly important for research organizations to show the impact of their work to donor agencies, grey literature such as technical project reports can serve as a valuable source of information to complement the missing funding acknowledgements in their research information management systems. This paper presents the results of a study on extracting funding-related information from grey literature through text mining and complementing the corresponding MARC 21 bibliographic records of an international agroforestry research repository. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Materials related to Japanese military "comfort women" in Korea are managed by several institutions. Each digital archive has their own metadata schema and management policies. So far, a standard or a common guideline for describing digital records is not formalized. We propose a Japanese military "comfort women" knowledge graph to semantically interlink the digital records from distributed digital archives. To build a Japanese military "comfort women" knowledge graph, digital records and descriptive metadata were collected from existing digital archives. A list of metadata was defined by analyzing commonly used properties and a knowledge model designed by reusing standard vocabularies. Knowledge was constructed by interlinking the collected records, external data sources, and enriching data. The knowledge graph was evaluated using the FAIR data maturity model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The MetaScholar Initiative of Emory University Libraries, in collaboration with the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, the Atlanta History Center, and the Georgia Music Hall of Fame, received an Institute of Museum and Library Services grant to develop a new model for library-museum-archives collaboration. This collaboration will broaden access to resources for learning communities through the use of the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAIPMH). The project, titled Music of Social Change (MOSC), will use OAI-PMH as a tool to bridge the widely varying metadata standards and practices across museums, archives, and libraries. This paper will focus specifically on the unique advantages of the use of OAIPMH to concurrently maximize the exposure of metadata emergent from varying metadata cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Biodiversity is a data-intense science, drawing as it does on data from a large number of disciplines in order to build up a coherent picture of the extent and trajectory of life on earth. This paper argues that as sets of heterogeneous databases are made to converge, there is a layering of values into the emergent infrastructure. It is argued that this layering process is relatively irreversible, and that it operates simultaneously at a very concrete level (fields in a database) and at a very abstract one (the coding of the relationship between the disciplines and the production of a general ontology). Finally, it is maintained that science studies as a discipline is able to (and should) make a significant contribution to the design of robust and flexible databases which recognize this performative character of infrastructure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I address the following research questions in the context of having built a research data repository to safeguard cultural research data. How can the PARADISEC team ensure the records we create in the course of our research will exist into the future and remain citable? How can our research data be made available for a wider public, most importantly for the people recorded and their descendants? How can we prepare our students for this new approach to curation of primary research data so that they can build good methodology into their normal research practice, with much more productive outcomes? You wonʼt know what you had till itʼs gone: analog recordings and cultural restitution in the 21st century [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reproducibility is at the core of science. For this reason, a common practice for authors is to provide links to the data used in their manuscripts upon submission to peer-reviewed journals. In space science, reference to archives' websites of major data providers like space agencies are still accepted by most journals. However, even these websites are not persistent links and will eventually not be accepted once journals require full compliance with the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) data principles. On the contrary, Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) associated to data could provide persistent links. But so far, the publishing industry is systematically minting DOIs related to their articles or books without requiring DOIs for the data used in their publications. Furthermore, DOIs related to data would not only link refereed publications to the data location. It could also enable a more precise attribution to the data producers and publishers while providing the capability to eventually trace their use. These latter points require that journals eventually request or even enforce the use of these DOIs. For data producers, proper attribution and usage are important in the context of securing research grants or extension of projects. Additionally, structured metadata included in the DOI landing pages offer the possibility for datasets to be discoverable by the new Google Dataset Search (GDS) engine, available since January 2020. This paper describes the on-going activities at the European Space Agency (ESA) to mint DOIs for datasets served across the space science archives, and how a subset of these DOIs are already discoverable by GDS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Informationswissenschaft: Theorie, Methode & Praxis / Sciences de l’information: Théorie, Méthode & Pratique is the property of University Library of Bern and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The City of Sydney adopted a user centred design approach to transform its archives systems and processes to meet user needs. Key to the transformation was a project to design and implement a new archives management system, complete with digital preservation functionality and a publicly accessible user portal. This paper examines tensions between archival practice and the user experience, and what actually happens when the user is placed at the centre of design initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Records created through institutional and personal activity are the primary concern of archives, regardless of the form or media of those records. his pa- per focuses on the implications of the networked society for how such records are created, as well as how they are deined and appraised by archivists, and the kinds of searching and uses to which they might be subjected. It argues that in responding to these implications, archives will have to move beyond the custodial and institutional mindset that has dominated the ield for cen- turies and instead embrace a network orientation. It proposes and provides examples of several potential conceptualizations of "networked records": the multi-provenance bureaucratic record and the record created by the crowd; the metadata record; the extra-institutional record, the transinstitutional and the transjurisdictional record, and the mobile or itinerant record; the stitched-together record; the mined, mapped and compiled record; and the implied or inferred record. he paper also identiies several dissemination and access challenges faced by archivists when networked records and their metadata accumulate into a virtual "archival corpus". hese challenges include the ways in which that corpus might be mined, forensically analyzed, cross-compiled, found lacking, augmented and otherwise searched or mapped to the beneit or detriment of organizational, scholarly, community and personal interests. After iden- tifying a set of human rather than asset, data or task-centred principles that it is argued should inform archival activities such as appraisal, description and dissemination, the paper concludes that traditional appraisal techniqu- es alone are unable to cope with these challenges. Instead the ield working together with researchers in information retrieval (IR) should focus on in- novating in the area of archival information storage and retrieval ("archival IR") in ways that can exploit the networked creation and uses of records and other forms of primary data and their metadata, and respond to and protect against potential vulnerabilities, particularly those relating to privacy and security, that might be exposed by such developments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Standardization both reflects and facilitates the collaborative and networked approach to metadata creation within the fields of librarianship and archival studies. These standards--such as Resource Description and Access and Rules for Archival Description--and the theoretical frameworks they embody enable professionals to work more effectively together. Yet such guidelines also determine who is qualified to undertake the work of cataloging and processing in libraries and archives. Both fields are empathetic to facilitating user-generated metadata and have taken steps towards collaborating with their research communities (as illustrated, for example, by social tagging and folksonomies) but these initial experiments cannot yet be regarded as widely adopted and radically open and social. This paper explores the recent histories of descriptive work in libraries and archives and the challenges involved in departing from deeply established models of metadata creation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of IFLA Journal is the property of Sage Publications, Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) presents a complex conceptual model. Because of this, it is not easy for everyone to understand. The purpose of this paper is to make some of the more difficult aspects of the FRBR model, in particular the Group 1 entities work, expression, manifestation, and item, easier to understand by placing FRBR in the context of what it is: a conceptual entity-relationship model. To this end, a definition of the term ‘model’ is presented, a variety of types and functions of models are introduced, conceptual models are discussed in detail, modeling an abstraction is explained, and different ways of interpreting FRBR are suggested. Various models used in the history of cataloging are introduced to place FRBR in the context of the historical development of document models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a case study of how six digitization competencies were developed and disseminated via grant-funded digitization projects at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas Libraries Special Collections and Archives. The six competencies are project planning, grant writing, project management, metadata, digital capture, and digital asset management. The authors will introduce each competency, discuss why it is important, and describe how it was developed during the course of the grant project, as well as how it was taught in a workshop environment. The differences in competency development for three different stakeholder groups will be examined: early career grant staff gaining on-the-job experience; experienced digital collections librarians experimenting and innovating; and a statewide audience of cultural heritage professionals attending grant-sponsored workshops. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reflects on the place of books in archival collections and outlines the methodology used to incorporate Germaine Greer’s publications and personal library in the Greer Archive. Identification and inclusion of metadata documenting context, significance to the creator and relationships to other records in the Archive, demonstrate the value that can be added to bibliographic records. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Standardization both reflects and facilitates the collaborative and networked approach to metadata creation within the fields of librarianship and archival studies. These standards--such as Resource Description and Access and Rules for Archival Description--and the theoretical frameworks they embody enable professionals to work more effectively together. Yet such guidelines also determine who is qualified to undertake the work of cataloging and processing in libraries and archives. Both fields are empathetic to facilitating user-generated metadata and have taken steps towards collaborating with their research communities (as illustrated, for example, by social tagging and folksonomies) but these initial experiments cannot yet be regarded as widely adopted and radically open and social. This paper explores the recent histories of descriptive work in libraries and archives and the challenges involved in departing from deeply established models of metadata creation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The last 30 years have seen significant investments in the development of digital infrastructures to support archaeological practice. From field recording systems to national data archives, these have come to play an increasingly dominant role in the collection, management and access to data used in the creation of new archaeological knowledge. While archaeologists have paid a lot of attention to the technical creation of these infrastructures, much less is said about their wider political, cultural and social aspects. Despite this, more and more countries are building digital infrastructures to support cultural heritage management, the curation of archaeological data and to provide access for data reuse. A lack of critical reflection surrounding these infrastructures opens archaeologists, heritage organisations and their wider user communities to unforeseen outcomes, hidden socio-political and technical biases, and the promotion of conventions and processes which ultimately carry consequences for knowledge practice. The way that infrastructures become embedded in practice means that a critical understanding of their implementation and application – the opportunities they offer, the constraints they impose, and the perspectives they adopt – needs to become part of a wider debate surrounding their informed use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Linked data (LD) have the capability to open up and share materials, held in libraries, archives and museums (LAMs), in ways that are restricted by many existing metadata standards. Specifically, LD interlinking can be used to enrich data and to improve data discoverability on the Web through interlinking related resources across datasets and institutions. However, there is currently a notable lack of interlinking across leading LD projects in LAMs, impacting upon the discoverability of their materials. This research describes the Novel Authoritative Interlinking for Semantic Web Cataloguing in Libraries (NAISC-L) interlinking framework. Unlike existing interlinking frameworks, NAISC-L was designed specifically with the requirements of the LAM domain in mind. The framework was evaluated by Information Professionals (IPs), including librarians, archivists and metadata cataloguers, via three user-experiments including a think-aloud test, an online interlink creation test and a field test in a music archive. Across all experiments, participants achieved a high level of interlink accuracy, and usability measures indicated that IPs found NAISC-L to be useful and user-friendly. Overall, NAISC-L was shown to be an effective framework for engaging IPs in the process of LD interlinking, and for facilitating the creation of richer and more authoritative interlinks between LAM resources. NAISC-L supports the linking of related resource across datasets and institutions, thereby enabling richer and more varied search queries, and can thus be used to improve the discoverability of materials held in LAMs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historical and long-term environmental datasets are imperative to understanding how natural systems respond to our changing world. Although immensely valuable, these data are at risk of being lost unless actively curated and archived in data repositories. The practice of data rescue, which we define as identifying, preserving, and sharing valuable data and associated metadata at risk of loss, is an important means of ensuring the long-term viability and accessibility of such datasets. Improvements in policies and best practices around data management will hopefully limit future need for data rescue; these changes, however, do not apply retroactively. While rescuing data is not new, the term lacks formal definition, is often conflated with other terms (i.e. data reuse), and lacks general recommendations. Here, we outline seven key guidelines for effective rescue of historically collected and unmanaged datasets. We discuss prioritization of datasets to rescue, forming effective data rescue teams, preparing the data and associated metadata, and archiving and sharing the rescued materials. In an era of rapid environmental change, the best policy solutions will require evidence from both contemporary and historical sources. It is, therefore, imperative that we identify and preserve valuable, at-risk environmental data before they are lost to science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since its launch in 2008, the European Genome–Phenome Archive (EGA) has been leading the archiving and distribution of human identifiable genomic data. In this regard, one of the community concerns is the potential usability of the stored data, as of now, data submitters are not mandated to perform any quality control (QC) before uploading their data and associated metadata information. Here, we present a new File QC Portal developed at EGA, along with QC reports performed and created for 1 694 442 files [Fastq, sequence alignment map (SAM)/binary alignment map (BAM)/CRAM and variant call format (VCF)] submitted at EGA. QC reports allow anonymous EGA users to view summary-level information regarding the files within a specific dataset, such as quality of reads, alignment quality, number and type of variants and other features. Researchers benefit from being able to assess the quality of data prior to the data access decision and thereby, increasing the reusability of data (https://ega-archive.org/blog/data-upcycling-powered-by-ega/). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]