Computer Supported Cooperative Work
How institutional factors influence the creation of scientific metadata
Proceedings of the 2011 iConference
Awash in stardust: data practices in astronomy
Proceedings of the 2011 iConference
Analytic potential of data: assessing reuse value
Proceedings of the 11th annual international ACM/IEEE joint conference on Digital libraries
Proceedings of the 12th Annual International Digital Government Research Conference: Digital Government Innovation in Challenging Times
Exploring the determinants of publication of scientific data in open data initiative
Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance
Exploring the rhythms of scientific data use
Proceedings of the 2012 iConference
Proceedings of the 2012 iConference
Supporting content curation communities: The case of the Encyclopedia of Life
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
The conundrum of sharing research data
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
Beyond trust and reliability: reusing data in collaborative cancer epidemiology research
Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported cooperative work
Supporting Scientific Collaboration: Methods, Tools and Concepts
Computer Supported Cooperative Work
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An important set of challenges for eScience initiatives and digital libraries concern the need to provide scientists with the ability to access data from multiple sources. This paper argues that an analysis of scientists‘ reuse of data prior to the advent of eScience can illuminate the requirements and design of digital libraries and cyberinfrastructure. As part of a larger study on data sharing and reuse, I investigated the processes by which ecologists locate data that were initially collected by others. Ecological data are unusually complex and present daunting problems of interpretation and analysis that must be considered in the design of cyberinfrastructure. The ecologists that I interviewed found ways to overcome many of these difficulties. One part of my results shows that ecologists use formal and informal knowledge that they have gained through disciplinary training and through their own data-gathering experiences to help them overcome hurdles related to finding, acquiring, and validating data collected by others. A second part of my findings reveals that ecologists rely on formal notions of scientific practice that emphasize objectivity to justify the methods they use to collect data for reuse. I discuss the implications of these findings for digital libraries and eScience initiatives.