Love Your Data Week Day 4 – Finding the Right Data

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Today’s LYD post is by Don P. Jason III, MLIS, MS, Clinical Informationist based at the Donald C. Harrison Health Sciences Library.

Welcome to Day 4 of “Love Your Data Week!” Whether you’re a student analyzing a data set for a school project or a researcher combining data sets to create new insights, finding the right data is essential! This blog post will list a few places you can look to find free, authoritative and unique data sets. The data sets have be broken down into three categories:  US Government Data Sets, International Data Sets and Google Data Sets.

US Government Data Sets

Data.gov http://data.gov – This web site has an eclectic mix of datasets from criminal justice to climate data.  This government site encourages people to use the data to create web and mobile applications and design data visualizations.

US Census Bureau http://www.census.gov/data.html – This web site provides data on the US population and economy.  Utilizing this site’s data has never been easier thanks to new: API’s, data visualizations, mobile apps and interactive web apps.

Healthdata.gov https://www.healthdata.gov/ – This web site includes US healthcare data.  The site is dedicated to making high value health data more accessible to entrepreneurs, researchers and policy makers.

National Climatic Data Center http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data-access/quick-links#loc-clim – This is the world’s largest archive of weather data. It has a robust collection of environmental, meteorological and climate data sets from the US National Climatic Data Center.

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Love Your Data Week Day 3 – Good data examples

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Today’s Love Your Data Week’s post is by Tiffany Grant PhD, Interim Assistant Director for Research and Informatics at the Health Sciences Library (HSL) and Research Informationist.

Data, FAIR Data

If asked to define good data, the definitions would run the gamut, as the interpretation of the term will be specific to the types and formats of data typically collected by the individual. However, simply put, good data meets the standard of being of good quality, and data quality generally refers to the ability of data to serve the use it was intended. In short, data quality hinges on the reliability and application efficiency of data. The combination of good data quality and data documentation ensures accurate interpretation and reproducibility. Beyond documentation, a number of federal mandates dictate that data be shared beyond one’s own lab notebook, and in order to ensure proper interpretation and reproducibility of your data, it must be FAIR.

 

 

 

 

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Met Opera on Demand and MGG Online trials continue

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We are halfway through our trials of Met Opera on Demand and German music encyclopedia MGG Online. It is critical that we measure the level of your interest and need in these resources (especially MGG). So let us know by spending some time exploring these great new products. Access to both resources is automatic from on campus or from off-campus by authentication (VPN only during trial)

 

For the Love of the Library — Thank You!

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The Clermont College Library hosted a special event, For the Love of the Library, on Thursday, February 9th.  The purpose of this event was to highlight the 1st floor renovations made possible by our donors and share plans for student-centered improvements to our library’s 2nd floor.

 

Thanks to all who celebrated with us from our community, UC’s Clifton campus, UC Libraries, and UC Clermont.

Katie Foran-Mulcahy
Library Director

Love Your Data Week Day 2 Documenting, Describing and Defining

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Today’s Love Your Data Week’s post is by Tiffany Grant PhD, Interim Assistant Director for Research and Informatics at the Health Sciences Library (HSL) and Research Informationist.

The Big 3 of Data

Documenting, describing and defining your data are the 3 most critical components of good data management and your data legacy. If done properly, documentation ensures accurate interpretation and reproducibility of your data. Additionally, it improves the integrity of the scholarly record by providing a more complete picture of how your research was conducted.

Data Things to Do

  1. Document all file names and formats associated with your project
  2. Describe how your data was derived including a description of any equipment and/or software used in the process
    1. Describe your file naming conventions and folder structures
  3. Define any abbreviations, variables or codes used in your data or your file names/folders

Big 3 Data Basics

Who: Who are the contributors?

What: What kind of data was collected and what analyses were done to generate the data?

Why: Why was the project started, i.e. what questions did you hope to answer?

Where: Where did you get your data (if you aren’t the creator)? What is the physical location of the data?

How: How was your data generated?  

Message of the day

Good documentation tells people they can trust your data by enabling validation, replication, and reuse.

Love Your Data Week Day 1 Defining Data Quality

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Today’s LYD post features the thoughts of Dylan Shields, the Graduate Assistant for the Chemistry-Biology Library and Chemistry Graduate Student in Anna Gudmundsdottir’s Lab.

Welcome back to another edition of Love Your Data Week!!

The first topic for this week is going to focus on DEFINING DATA QUALITY!

So what IS data quality? Well, first off it is important to note that data quality definitions and practices can differ quite vastly depending on the field of study. However, there are a few markers of data quality that can be broadly applicable to most research. These markers include: accuracy, consistency, completeness, and accessibility.

So what are these markers and why are they important?

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Black X Design

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Randy Wilson and DAAP Library Staff partnered to create “Black By Design,” a display that showcases pioneers and youngbloods in black fashion. Many of the images in the display are from the Vogue Archive, a database of every Vogue magazine ever published. The drawings were custom created by Professor Wilson himself.

Love Your Data Week 2017

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Drop the roses and the box of chocolate because Love Your Data week is almost here.  All next week, the UC Libraries informationist team will be blogging loving tips about how to best care for your research data.  The theme for 2017 is emphasizing data quality for researchers at any stage in their career and the daily topics are:

Feb 13th  – Defining Data Quality

Feb 14th Documenting, Describing, Defining

Feb 15th  Good Data Examples

Feb 16th –  Finding the Right Data

Feb 17th – Rescuing Unloved Data

Follow the action or join in on Twitter using hashtags (#LYD17 #loveyourdata)

 

Other social media outlets will be Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest.

So much better for you and your data than a box of chocolate!

Questions and comments to AskData@uc.edu

Dean’s Corner: Remembering Dr. Henry Heimlich

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I first met Dr. Henry Heimlich, or “Hank”, shortly after I arrived at the University of Cincinnati. To my surprise, he had expressed a strong interest in meeting me, so I eagerly invited him to join me for dinner at my home, along with Associate Dean Emeritus Steve Marine, the libraries’ Director of Development Christa Bernardo and our respective spouses. It was then that I learned of his time as a surgeon with the US Naval Group in World War II. Hank had been stationed in China, and his first stop was my hometown of Chongqing.

Sharing dinner at my home with Hank Heimlich

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