PIDapalooza 2020

A marine science laboratory in coastal California. A joint medical school between two universities. A German institution with four different versions of its name (German, English, Slovenian, Croatian). A small college in Vermont that is shutting down.

In a registry of research organizations, does the marine science laboratory belong? Should there be one record for the medical school, or two, or…..? Which should be the official name of the German institution? How should the registry indicate that the Vermont college is no longer active? These are actual examples of the types of data curation decisions that the Research Organization Registry (ROR) is encountering as it builds out the registry following the initial launch in January 2019.

Much of the focus in the PID community tends to be on maintaining and supporting identifiers themselves, but what practices should we follow to manage all of the other metadata associated with PIDs? To solve this problem in an institutional context, ROR is establishing a community curation board to bring together experts from across the PID, library, and research communities to collectively approach the challenges and opportunities in curating institutional metadata. In this interactive session, participants will step into the shoes of our fledgling curation committee and walk through actual curation scenarios, working together to design solutions to institutional identity problems. Choose your own curation adventure! Help us design workflows and policies that support both PIDs and all of the metadata around them! This session will be facilitated by the ROR Outreach team along with members of the ROR Community.

How would you run the session to support the spirit of PIDapalooza as a laid-back, welcoming, energetic and exciting meeting, and ensure at least 10 minutes of your session are used to interact with the audience?

We are planning to use an interactive “choose-your-own-adventure” format for the majority of the session, in which participants will work in small groups to walk through specific curation scenarios - some of which the ROR team has already been working on - and come up with their own ideas and solutions, and then report back to the whole group about their experience.