Purdue Librarians Work to Update Agricultural Data Sharing Techniques

"Agricultural research can take seasons to come to fruition, meaning the data researchers gather is voluminous, tracking things like weather patterns and crop yields over years. A failure to establish data standards and sharing practices means that most of these raw figures never make it out of the hands of the researchers who gather them. With new open access standards coming to federally funded research, though, agricultural researchers will need share their data more effectively, and a team of scientists and librarians at Purdue University may have the first blueprint for the field. The Purdue team was the driving force behind the Smarter Agriculture conference that took place in Washington on October 10. Despite being hampered by a lack of representation from federal agencies due to the government shutdown , the conference brought together attendees from universities, farming concerns, and private enterprise to discuss how to create a system for sharing agricultural data. In large part, said Sylvie Brouder, a Purdue agronomist who’s been working on the problem of data-sharing  in agricultural sciences for years, it’s a system that stakeholders will have to build from the ground up ... On one front, the department will start offering its first data management class to students in the biochemistry major, which at Purdue is under the umbrella of the agricultural sciences department. Previously, hey’d been bringing the subject into classes here and there as visitors, but this approach hasn’t been sufficient to get the concepts to take root.  That’s why they’re trying multiple methods to find what works best. In addition to making a class available, Stowell-Bracke and Carlson will be taking a cohort of graduate students under their wing to teach them how to use best practices to manage their own data, something many haven’t been exposed to previously. 'People don’t give their data a thought until something bad happens,' Stowell-Bracke said. 'They store everything on their laptop, and leave the laptop on a bus in Madrid.'  The Purdue team is also working to build a model of what a shared, searchable agricultural science database would look like with its recently launched data management tool, the Purdue UniversityResearch Repository (PURR). Built on the HubZero platform and operated by Purdue Libraries and the Information Technology department, PURR provides primers on how to manage data, collaborate on projects, and publish data with metadata tags and DOI references for tracking how often and where its cited.