DataBits Newsletter

  By John Porter, Virginia Coastal Reserve LTER The big decision and assessing virtual meeting needs Each January, the Virginia Coast Reserve LTER holds an “All Scientists’ Meeting” to exchange information about research progress and to plan for upcoming activities over the coming year. Typically, this is an in-person meeting held at the Anheuser-Busch Coastal… Read more »

By Jon Ide and Mark Servilla, Environmental Data Initiative ezEML is a form-based online tool to streamline the creation of metadata in the Ecological Metadata Language (EML). It was created by the Environmental Data Initiative (EDI) and employs EDI’s Metapype library, which is a general-purpose framework for creating and validating metadata, along with Metapype’s implementation… Read more »

  By Kristin Vanderbilt (EDI) & Colin Smith (EDI) Scientists, students, and information management professionals often find themselves in need of code or software to help clean, process, document, and manage data. The Information Management Code Registry (IMCR) aims to make it easier to find existing tools by guiding users to discover software that performs… Read more »

Each year, the LTER Information Management (IM) committee gathers updates from sites across the network related to IM system and personnel changes over the past year, compiling them into a series of ‘Site Bytes’, or site summaries. This November, the first 2020 Site Bytes that started rolling into the editors’ (virtual) office were all from… Read more »

What would happen to your site’s data if a fire, hurricane, or ransomware tore through your campus? Veteran information manager John Porter decided that a cloud backup was a wise insurance policy.

The community of LTER Information managers publishes the DataBits Newsletter approximately twice a year, with updates on information activities at sites and deep dives into topics of interest to LTER and other Environmental Information Managers. In the Summer 2019 issue, Site Bytes makes a triumphant return after a long absence. There is also plenty of… Read more »

A full slate for the Summer 2019 Databits! Site Bytes makes a triumphant return after a long absence. There is also plenty of information on new initiatives, including upgrades to PASTA, Best Practices for using Zotero to manage bibliographic data, development of a core metabase for metadata management, a chance to catch up on a… Read more »

This issue features articles that present a wide set of themes including historical facts, a vision for collaboration strategies given new partnerships and challenges, descriptions of systems that produce EML packages to deposit data in data repositories, individual experiences of special events like the 2017 solar eclipse and a tropical hurricane, and information management post-LTER… Read more »

Welcome to the Fall 2014 issue of Databits. The articles submitted for this issue cover a range of topics. A thought-provoking commentary presents a vision for archiving simulation model data and code – perhaps some of our readers will address current and emerging capabilities on that topic in a future issue. A guest contributor shares… Read more »

Welcome to the Spring 2014 Issue of Databits! This issue is dominated by two major themes – the past and the future. As we experience progressive changes in information management practices and technologies there is an illusory sameness, a sense that what “is now” always was and always will be. However, as articles in this… Read more »