David A. Greenbaum, IST–DS
The creation of Data Services as one of the four major IST departments signals a new approach to the development of common technology services for the Berkeley campus. It is the recognition that a focus on data, whether for academic research or administrative decision support or group collaboration, is essential for the future of information technology service for the research university.
The need for data-centric common IT services has been called out in a variety of forums. Berkeley faculty from the sciences, social sciences, and humanities have defined data stewardship and digital asset management as high-priority future services in the campus's latest IT Strategic Plan [1]. Faculty highlighted the criticality of such areas as "storing very large data sets that can be actively accessed by multiple groups; comprehensive digital asset-management solutions, including application archiving, to all researchers; … efforts to develop metadata standards for core research areas" [2].
At the national level, recent studies from the National Science Foundation [3] and the American Council of Learned Societies [4] on the future of research, teaching, and public knowledge sharing argue vividly for much greater investments in data gathering, data management, and related visualization, simulation, and collaborative technologies across disciplines and institutions. A note that both studies strike is that such services will require new institutional partnership models and new investments in staff development if higher education is to address these needs.
From the administrative leadership on campus, the UC Berkeley Data Stewardship Council has carried out an extensive analysis of the campus's future needs for integrated data from many sources to improve administrative reporting and decision making [5]. The Data Stewardship Council's report builds a compelling business case for an integrated approach to decision support via a campuswide enterprise data warehouse (see Thomas King's related article on the architecture for the enterprise data warehouse, A roadmap for decision making: Data Warehouse Architecture).
Finally, the emergence of a wealth of new, free collaborative and information tools from such companies as Google and Yahoo pushes the campus to investigate what our partnerships might be with these companies so that we can provide richer personal information environments and collaborative, social software tools.
To help the campus address these needs, the mission of the new Data Services (DS) department is to provide stewardship of both academic and administrative data, as well as tools for data presentation, visualization, analysis, and collaboration. To do this, campus and off-campus collaborations and new partnership models are essential, and thus Data Services is charged, as well, to help prepare the campus for the convergence of IST, Library, Educational Technology Services, and appropriate external providers.
The Data Services department begins with four units, whose missions are as follows:
Data Services as a department is now only at its starting point. The greatest challenge DS faces is to determine those specific areas of service delivery and staff expertise of most value to the campus now and in the future amongst a sea of data service possibilities. As the reader may infer from the scope of needs and mission described above, there are many potential areas to work in, and many of substantial complexity. It is critical for DS and IST to understand what common data services are of most value to the campus community, and then what role DS and IST can best play in providing, or partnering to provide, these services.
To move ahead with building a new department while ensuring delivery of existing commitments, Data Services will focus on the following work this semester:
Campus input and guidance is essential to this work, and I invite you to contact me at to give suggestions and to get additional information.
[1] Research 4: Data stewardship and digital asset management, UC Berkeley Campuswide IT Strategic Plan.
[3] Report of Blue-Ribbon Advisory Panel on Cyberinfrastructure and NSF's Cyberinfrastructure Vision for 21st Century Discovery — version 7.1 [PDF], National Science Foundation.
[4] Our Cultural Commonwealth: The final report of the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities & Social Sciences [PDF], American Council of Learned Societies,.
[5] Enterprise Data Warehouse Roadmap [PDF], UC Berkeley Data Stewardship Council.
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