For the second year in a row, UCOP staff at the California Digital Library (CDL) has captured one of UC’s annual Larry L. Sautter Awards. This year’s project team was recognized with a silver Sautter award for its creation of Dash, a user-friendly platform for managing, archiving and sharing research data.

Sponsored by the UC Information Technology Leadership Council, the Sautter Awards recognize collaborative innovations in IT that advance UC’s missions of teaching, research, public service and patient care, or that improve the effectiveness of university processes. For 2017, three gold awards, two silver and five honorable mentions were announced at the UC Computing Services Conference in San Diego on Aug. 8.

Dash began as a research data management service called DataShare initiated by UCSF faculty and developed by the UCSF Library and the UCSF Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI). The CDL project team refined the concept to create Dash, which is currently in use at UCOP, six campuses (UC Berkeley, UC Davis Department of Bio and Ag Engineering, UC Irvine, UC Merced, UC Santa Cruz, and UCSF) and DataONE. While Dash is based at the University of California Curation Center (UC3), a program at California Digital Library, a key element of the platform is that it is layered on top of existing data repositories, minimizing the need for additional archiving support.

Participating researchers can use Dash to document, preserve and publicly share their research data with minimal support, as well as find, retrieve and reuse data made available by others. So far, over 300 data sets have been deposited by researchers.

“Dash has made it so much easier to make UCSF research data open and transparent. We are really lucky to have such a great resource here,” said UCSF Data Services Librarian Ariel Deardorff.

The simple, intuitive interface of Dash was designed with individual researchers in mind, explained Daniella Lowenberg, who leads the project. “The Dash team has prioritized researcher and library feedback as well as community standards to develop a data publishing platform that is easily integrated within researcher workflows.” And development is ongoing for the open source platform. “Our hope is that we can continue to optimize Dash so that publishing data will become a normal practice within the research community,” said Lowenberg.

The Sautter Award-winning Dash team and their roles:

• John Chodacki, principal investigator
• Stephen Abrams, principal investigator
• Daniella Lowenberg, product manager
• Marisa Strong, technical development manager
• Scott Fisher, lead front-end developer
• David Moles, lead back-end developer
• Bhavitavya Vedula, developer
• John Kratz UI/UX designer
• Joel Hagedorn, web production developer

Find out more about Dash: https://dash.ucop.edu

Read article about all of this year’s Sautter Award winners.

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