The USAIN Agricultural Research Services Interest Group (ARSIG) is pleased to announce we will be hosting a webinar “Historic Yields: Making Old Agricultural Data New Again” presented by Sandi Caldrone of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. See the event details below. The webinar will be recorded.
All are welcome to attend!
Please direct any questions to IG co-conveners Sarah Williams (scwillms@illinois.edu) and Maggie Albro (malbro@utk.edu).
Historic Yields: Making Old Agricultural Data New Again
Presented by Sandi Caldrone
Wednesday, September 28
1:00-2:00pm (Central)
https://illinois.zoom.us/j/88557979234?pwd=bFpJRFJiOTMyZUhxd2RISnljZ1F4UT09
Meeting ID: 885 5797 9234 | Password: 624479
Webinar Description: Dusty annual reports, typewritten tables, random PDF files, and Excel trackers full of idiosyncratic notes and special formatting. How do we transform records like these into Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) data? Historical agricultural datasets present information professionals with a smorgasbord of digital preservation challenges. In this webinar, data librarian Sandi Caldrone walks you through her experiences with two such datasets – soybean tests dating back to 1941 and the Morrow Plots experiment dating back to 1876 – and the challenges, lessons learned, and old-fashioned team effort it takes to make historical data usable again. We will also make time for attendees to share their own experiences with historical data. Please feel free to bring an example to share.
Sandi’s Bio: Sandi Caldrone is the librarian for the Research Data Service at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. She leads education and outreach efforts for the service, and is particularly interested in transforming traditional workshops into self-guided learning experiences. Her research interests include data rescue, data visualization, and curating research datasets for classroom use. She previously worked for the Purdue University Libraries’ data repository where she curated a wide variety of datasets. Sandi earned her M.S. in Library and Information Science with a focus on data curation from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, and also holds an M.A. in Anthropology and Women’s Studies from Northern Illinois University.
