Summer 2007


Ontario university libraries launch electronic data service

The Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL) recently announced the launch of the Ontario Data Documentation, Extraction Service and Infrastructure Initiative (ODESI), which will provide university researchers with unprecedented access to a significant number of datasets in a web-based data extraction system.



ODESI will be delivered through the highly successful Scholars' Portal resource.

In a recent testing phase, first year undergraduate students reported that the new service was "fun to use." They were able to analyze data during a three-hour workshop - something which ordinarily would have taken several weeks to accomplish using traditional tools and methods, and that usually would not have been undertaken by first year students.

ODESI will be built on an international metadata standard and will provide both faculty and students with the tools for finding, extracting and analyzing data from a variety of sources, including Statistics Canada, polling data, as well as other national and international data sources.

For undergraduates, it means that they will be exposed to a fast, efficient research resource at an early stage in their careers.

Researchers working with opinion polls, for instance, will be able search across hundreds of datasets and collections to see trends and historical patterns over time. To date, such comparative analysis has been lacking due to the enormous amount of time and labour needed to search and locate data manually.

Carleton University will be leading this project in close partnership with the University of Guelph. "This will do for data what Scholars' Portal did for electronic journals," said Michael Ridley, Chief Information Officer and Chief Librarian, University of Guelph.

ODESI will be housed at Scholars' Portal, located at the University of Toronto, and will support its goal of providing access for networked scholars to a set of tools to aid both teaching and research. ODESI is jointly funded by the OCUL community and OntarioBuys for a total of $1.04 million over three years.

For more information, visit www.carleton.ca/duc/newsroom.

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