The annual announcement for the ICSPR Summer Program, what we used to call “summer camp for social scientists”, came across the transom.  The summer program used to be a place where advanced graduate students and faculty gathered each summer in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on the campus of the University of Michigan, to learn new statistical skills and polish up on old techniques.

But it’s grown to be much more than that, with lots of short one-week courses on specialized topics, many of which would be of interest to technical support staff in elections offices, lawyers, advocates, and others who work in the community.

This announcement below particularly struck me as potentially of interest to state elections officials, regional elections associations, non-profits engaged in elections data collection, and of course the EAC.

Many of these entities already engage in some form of data archiving but there seems to me little attention paid to curation for re-use.  While everyone doesn’t have the time or resources to send a staff member to the workshop below, it strikes me that it would be very valuable for the elections community to begin to build bridges with the community of data librarians.  There are pretty obvious areas of shared interest.

The ICPSR Summer Program is offering a five-day workshop on Curating and Managing Research Data for Re-Use, July 27-31, 2015. This workshop is for individuals interested or actively engaged in the curation and management of research data for sharing and reuse, particularly data librarians, data archivists, and data producers and stewards with responsibilities for data management.

Instructors Louise Corti (UK Data Archive), Jared Lyle (ICPSR), and Veerle Van den Eynden (UK Data Archive) will discuss best practices and tools for data curation, from selecting and preparing data for archiving to optimizing and promoting data for reuse. ICPSR social science quantitative datasets and UK Data Archive qualitative and cross-disciplinary data collections will serve as case studies and participants will track the datasets as they make their way through the data assessment, review, processing and curation pipeline.

Participants will learn about and gain proficiency in the full range of life cycle activities: data review and preparation; confidential data management; effective documentation practices; how to create, comply with, and evaluate required data management plans; digital repository requirements and assessment; and running user support and promotional activities for data. Emphasis will be placed on hands-on exercises demonstrating curation practices and on discussion for sharing local experiences and learning from others. Additional context and expertise will be provided through invited keynote lectures by research data experts.

Participants will leave with knowledge and experience of how to review, assess, curate, and promote data collections for long-term preservation and access.

Enrollment is limited to 25 participants. Registration is available through the ICPSR Summer Program Web site.

Questions? Contact the Summer Program at sumprog@icpsr.umich.edu or (734) 763-7400.