Dr. Erin Robinson1, Dr. Lesley Wyborn2,3, Dr. Rebecca Farrington3
1Metadata Game Changers, Boulder, United States, 2Australian National University, Canberra, Australia, 3AuScope Ltd, Melbourne, Australia
Biography:
Erin Robinson is an Information scientist who works with the Earth science data management community. After serving as the Executive Director for the Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) from 2014-2020, she co-founded Metadata Game Changers with Ted Habermann to champion good data management practices. Her current work is with biological field stations and focuses on connecting place-based data back to the places they originate from. She is also actively co-developing ways to bridge between Western scientific and Indigenous ways of knowing. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9998-0114
Lesley Wyborn is an Honorary Professor at ANU at the NCI and at the Research School of Earth Sciences. She also works part time for ARDC. She had 42 years’ experience in GA in geochemistry research (including field collection of thousands of samples), as well as in data management. Since leaving GA in 2014 has continued her research into many aspects of Data Science as applied to geochemistry, geophysics, data quality, versioning of datasets, as well as the development of transparent high-performance national-scale datasets for use in HPC environments. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5976-4943
Rebecca Farrington is the Director of Research Data Systems at AuScope Ltd, Australia’s national provider of Research Infrastructure for the Geoscience community. Prior to this, she was a Senior Research Fellow within the School of Geography Earth and Atmospheric Sciences and an Academic Convenor on the Petascale Campus Initiative (Chancellery) at The University of Melbourne. With research expertise in computational fluid dynamics, she is passionate about developing community-led data and compute-intensive research initiatives and supporting the people behind them. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2594-6965
Abstract:
Indigenous Data Sovereignty is the right of Indigenous Peoples to govern the collection, ownership, and application of data about Indigenous communities, peoples, lands, and resources (AIATSIS, 2019). This sovereignty extends beyond cultural heritage objects, to include Earth and environmental samples and data collected for place-based research. Historically, the initial collection of samples did not always include standard ways to document if consent was received from the local Indigenous communities or other Indigenous interests in the sample metadata, including permissions for reuse. Further, even if such metadata existed, there is little guarantee that these properties will be carried through to downstream subsamples and any derived analytical data. Without persistent connections of such metadata, including Local Context Notices and Labels, it is difficult to determine provenance, or that the primary samples were collected ethically.
The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance (Carroll et al. 2020) provide a high-level framework for the governance and management of Indigenous data. However, they do not specify how and where these principles should be expressed in a standardised, machine-actionable way for physical research samples, subsamples, data and data products.
This paper will highlight how CARE can be operationalised before collection and retroactively. An example from the University of California Berkeley Gump South Pacific Research Station, will describe how a field station is incorporating a cultural review process and Local Contexts Notices and Labels before granting research access. For the past, this paper considers retrospectively applying CARE metadata and Local Context Notices and Labels to legacy sample collections.