Williamson Award 2022

The 2022 Robert D. Williamson Award goes to Anne Stevenson from CSIRO.

View the video of Anne’s presentation on the VALA View channel here:

 

VALA President Melissa Parent presenting the 2022 Williamson Award medallion to Anne Stevenson

Anne commenced work at CSIRO in 1979 and throughout her 43 year career as a Librarian she has made an outstanding, unique contribution to information management across CSIRO and the profession. Anne’s work is key to the realisation of the highest possible value for CSIRO’s data assets, enabling their reuse and proliferation amongst a cohort of international researchers, thus achieving maximum impact for Australian science. Anne’s work is centred around the development of bespoke software that supports world-class information management at CSIRO and the provision of training and support for this software to increase its utility. In her current role, she leads a team of Data Librarians whose work fostering a strong data culture and research data management skills are at the forefront of industry standard.

Research Data Management is a relatively new specialisation within the library profession. Anne has an innate understanding of her role as a librarian, industry trends and information management tools which she has leveraged to forge a path for herself and her peers in this domain.

Anne is a respected go-to for advice within CSIRO. She is the acknowledged “guru” and all round sounding board for all of the innovative ideas and new initiatives within the Library service. We all depend on her and turn to her to support the innovative, the creative and the leading edge services that we want to promote and provide. Her advice and enthusiasm has been an inspiration and a great impetus for getting new projects not only off the ground, but well on their way to being supported and completed. Anne has exceptional domain specific knowledge and is consulted for large-scale, multidisciplinary projects within CSIRO.

Key examples of her contribution to project work include:
• Research Data Planner: Phase 3 : The Research Data Planner is a tool for gathering requirements and documenting decisions on how research data is managed throughout a project. Anne was involved in the third phase of development of this online tool, participating in feature request prioritisation, help text reviews, question syntax reviews creating design mock-ups for changes to functionality, and user acceptance testing.
• CMS: Specify Implementation : National Research Collections Australia (NRCA) encompasses 15+ million specimens documenting Australia’s rich biodiversity housed across multiple collections, all with their own data management system and metadata standards. NRCA is investigating how we can manage these collections centrally and Anne has provided key advice on required metadata to support this implementation. She has been involved extensively with this project, developing cross-walks between systems to establish a common set of descriptors.
• ePublish Anne has always been active in the publications space at CSIRO, looking at opportunities and assisting with developing solutions. Her involvement led to her being invited to be part of the project team that designed a publications approval system and the creation of a single enterprise repository which the approvals system was to feed. Her involvement in the ePublish project is addressed in greater detail in the ‘Innovation’ section.

Excellence is also evident in Anne’s operational work, examples of which include:
• Anne and her team deliver workshops and training at CSIRO for the organisation’s bespoke information management platforms, the Data Access Portal and the Research Data Planner. Anne’s passion for providing quality support to researchers is unparalleled, which is reflected in the quality of service that she and her team deliver.
• Anne raises awareness for Research Data Management and promotes this practice across the organisation hosting webinars, leading awareness activities and supporting the development of company on-demand training modules for Research Data Management. She is well-known as a metadata and citation expert and she provides advice to colleagues on best practice standards for these concepts.

Anne’s excellence and pride in her work is evident in all that she does. Anne has documented her extensive experience and knowledge for the benefit of the profession and has contributed to 13 publications, which include peer-reviewed conference papers and journal articles. For the full list of Anne’s publications, please see Anne’s ORCiD profile https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8543-2133

Anne is active in the national and international information and data communities and plays a strong leadership role within CSIRO supporting researchers, research leaders and publications officers; as well as acting as a subject matter expert for system and process development in the organisation.

Professional memberships include:
•Member 2012 – ongoing: Standards Australia IT-019: Information and Communications Technology Services – Learning, Education, Training and Research
•Member 2011 – ongoing: RIF-CS Advisory Board https://www.ands.org.au/partners-and-communities/ands-communities/rif-cs-advisory-board .
•Member & Peer-review: eResearch Australasia Conference Committee, 2019 edition https://conference.eresearch.edu.au/eresearch-australasia-conference-2019-home/.

Anne promotes best standards of practice for Research Data Management and Open Access Publishing. Examples of her engagement include:
• Strong support for Information Awareness Week, a CSIRO internal program and encourages her team to do the same. In 2021, Anne delivered a series of Data Clinics on the Research Data Planner with a colleague.
• The contribution of conference presentations and papers, including: Stevenson, Anne; Cronje, Carmi. Answering the call: researcher-driven training in data management. In: Open Repositories 2019; June 10-13, 2019; Hamburg, Germany. The 14th Annual Conference on Open Repositories; 2019. 11 p.. http://hdl.handle.net/102.100.100/179726?index=1
• CSIRO has regularly been a national sponsor for GovHack https://govhack.org/. Anne was part of the team that coordinated CSIROs involvement in the 2019 and 2020 editions of the event, posing several challenges to the nation.
• Thrive or survive – how can we adapt for the future; Australia@Sea – what is our future relationship with the ocean environment. The event was a huge success with over 60+ entries received. https://blog.csiro.au/one-hack-of-a-weekend/
• Data-driven decisions for improved disaster planning, management or recovery; Track and trace – help end plastic waste. More than 1000 people attended a digital version of GovHack, with 691 keen hackers in their midst. https://blog.csiro.au/govhack-2020/

Anne invests personally in the professional development of her team, her peers and herself. She leads by example through her engagement with new tools and concepts, transforming this knowledge into opportunities for her team, CSIRO and the profession. Anne is very generous with her time and shares her knowledge freely. She is an emotionally intelligent leader; throughout her career, she has drawn on her empathy, calm attitude and kindness to get results and to arrive at mutually beneficial compromise for all stakeholders.


VALA2022 E-Poster Street

DAP Hero Competition: taking data management to new heights at CSIRO

VALA2022 E-Poster

Tracey May
  • CSIRO
Christina Street
  • Data Librarian, Information Management and Technology
  • CSIRO
Amy Miniter
  • Data Librarian, Information Management and Technology
  • CSIRO

Please tag your comments, tweets, and blog posts about this session: #vala2022

Abstract

CSIRO’s Data Access Portal (DAP) is an international Core Trust Certified data repository that provides a secure platform for discovery, access and reuse of software and data assets. In 2021, CSIRO Agriculture & Food Data Champions, led by Dr Jen Taylor and the Research Data Support (RDS) team, devised a novel training method, the DAP Hero Competition, to foster a new learning culture at CSIRO. The Agile project management methodology was used to frame the project and implement activities. The competition itself was run over a three-month period.

The competition aimed to promote data stewardship through engagement with existing and novel approaches to training. The award categories motivated staff to develop their technical skills when working with legacy data, multidisciplinary data, large datasets and established data sharing as part of workflows. Entrants were encouraged to engage with a practical learning experience and to re-evaluate the time commitment required to create a deposit and safeguard data. A competitive, team-based framework and an attractive reward for winners provided the initial impetus for engagement. A superhero theme was chosen to demarcate the competition as quirky, fun and different from previous training approaches.

Training was presented as ‘coaching’ by members of the RDS team, rebranded as the ‘DAP Genius’. A sense of urgency was generated by creating a perceived shortage of training access by prioritising first responders for coaching ‘to help them win’. The DAP Genius ran Hacky Hours, gave live DAP demonstrations and offered one-on-one feedback for draft deposits. This approach successfully engaged with early adopters who contributed an initial flurry of entries. The provision of quality metadata was infused into the competition through a personalised review mechanism
from the DAP Genius who provided feedback on metadata to entrants via a call- back service. Entrants could opt-in to this process by indicating that they needed help with their deposits on their entry form. After this training, there was a noticeable improvement in the quality of metadata for entrants.

Despite conventional publicity delivered in high-profile meetings, entries plateaued at the halfway mark of the competition. A need was recognised to reignite interest and motivation to get people over the hurdle of learning and working the deposit process against a backdrop of competing demands. The project team innovated a series of ‘Sports Desk’ videos in which prominent staff commentated on the competition ‘leader board’ and “half time boundary reporters” interviewed teams dressed as superheroes on their motivations to use the DAP as part of their data management.

The DAP Hero Competition was an enormous success, adding 86 new deposits (2.5TB of data) representing a 46% increase of total Agriculture and Food datasets that had been contributed over a ten-year period. All entrants were required to have an ORCID, which resulted in the increase of ORCID uptake across Agriculture and Food. The competition highlighted the benefits of peer-to-peer learning, created positive associations for research data management and developed skills for career progression.

Biography

Tracey May is a Data Champion for CSIRO Agriculture and Food. As a member of the Research Data Support team, she utilises her experience with scientific data to help others with data management planning. Her focus is on creating a positive environment to support and nurture digital transformation.

 

 

Christina Street is a Data Librarian at CSIRO. As a member of the of the Research Data Support team, she assists with data management planning and driving cultural change to viewing and preserving data as a valuable asset. In addition, she provides support and training with the Data Access Portal, CSIRO’s permanent data archive and the Research Data Planner.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License

VALA2014 Session 7 Barwick

Hunters and collectors: seeking social media content for cultural heritage collections

VALA2014 CONCURRENT SESSION 7: Think Social
Wednesday 5 February 2014, 13:45 – 14:15
Persistent URL: http://www.vala.org.au/vala2014-proceedings/vala2014-session-7-barwick

Kathryn Barwick and Mylee Joseph

State Library of New South Wales

Cecile Paris and Stephen Wan

Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, Australia

Please tag your comments, tweets, and blog posts about this session: #vala14 and #s19

vala2014-logo-2
VALA Peer Reviewed

Abstract

A novel approach to collecting digital content for heritage collections is being explored and assessed in a trial of Vizie, an innovative social media tool researched and developed by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation. Collecting digital content for heritage collections is a priority for research libraries and other cultural institutions. This paper reports on the progress and learnings to date of the ongoing collaboration between the CSIRO and the State Library of New South Wales. The aim of the collaboration is to gather and curate online content centred around significant events and every day life in Australia and New South Wales.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License.

 

VALA2010 Session 11 Cook

VALA20120Keeping up: strategic use of online social networks for librarian current awareness

VALA 2010 CONCURRENT SESSION 11 – Social Networking
Thursday 11 February 2010 10:30 – 11:00
Persistent URL: http://www.vala.org.au/vala2010-proceedings/vala2010-session-11-cook

VALA Peer Reviewed PaperSue Cook

Information Specialist, CSIRO Information Management and Technology
http://www.csiro.au

Constance Wiebrands

Manager, Flexible Delivery and Lending Services, Curtin University Library
http://library.curtin.edu.au

Please tag your comments, tweets, and blog posts about this session: #VALA2010


Abstract

Librarians were surveyed in August 2009 about their use of online social networks for professional information. This paper describes the features of online social networking tools that facilitate the flow of relevant current awareness information. Practical methods that can be used strategically within tools to ensure that information is professionally relevant are described, including methods of discovery and evaluation.