About

Chuck Humphrey is the Director of the Portage Network, a data stewardship initiative of the Canadian Association of Research Libraries. Prior to becoming Director in September 2015, he was the Research Data Management Services Coordinator for the University of Alberta Libraries and the Academic Director of the Research Data Centre. Chuck takes full responsibility for the content of this blog. The opinions he expresses are his own and do not necessarily reflect the positions of the organisations for whom he is or has worked.

Following the completion of his PhD candidacy examinations in 1978, Chuck served as a statistical consultant in academic computing services for thirteen years. While in this position, he began a data library in 1980, providing researchers with access to datasets from off-campus data producers, such as, Statistics Canada and the ICPSR.  In 1992, the Data Library and Chuck were moved into University Libraries and located in the Social Sciences and Humanities Library. In 2012, the reporting lines for the Data Library were shifted to Digital Initiatives.

Over his career, Chuck has been involved in leadership roles in data organisations. He was elected IASSIST President in 1991 and served two two-year terms. From 1991 to 1995, he was an elected member of the ICPSR governing council.  In 1996, he became a member of the Statistics Canada Data Liberation Initiative External Advisory Committee and was Co-chair for fifteen of the sixteen years that he served.  In 2000, he helped establish the Statistics Canada Research Data Centre Network and has been an Academic Director since 2001. He has served on the CASRAI Board since June 2009 and was the Chair of the DDI Alliance Expert Committee from 2009 to 2012.

He has been an active contributor to several studies and consultations on research data. From 1990 to 1996, he was a member of the Data and Information Systems Panel of the Canadian Global Change Program.  In 2001 and 2002, he served on the Canadian National Data Archive Consultation and in 2004-2005, he participated on the National Consultation on Access to Scientific Research Data.  In 2007, he represented Canada at the International Data Forum and subsequently served as Canada’s representative on the OECD Global Science Forum on Data and Research Infrastructure for the Social Sciences from 2010-2011.  He was appointed to the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Joint Task Force on Library Support for E-Science in 2006 and contributed to the 2006 publication, To Stand the Test of Time Long-term Stewardship of Digital Data Sets in Science and Engineering and to the Task Force’s final report, released in December 2007.  In December 2006, he participated in the National Summit on a Canadian Digital Information Strategy (CDIS) and was subsequently appointed to the CDIS Strategy Development Committee in February 2007 to represent the interests of scientific data in the development of a national digital strategy.  He participated in the drafting of the policy document for the CDIS.

In 2009, he was invited to be a member of the Research Data Strategy Working Group, which subsequently became Research Data Canada in 2012.  In February 2011, he was invited to join the faculty of the ARL e-Science Institute, helping participants from 70 research libraries in North America write a strategic agenda on e-Science for their institution. In 2012-2013, he served on the Advisory Board of the CLIR/DLF Data Curation Fellowship program, which oversaw the training of post-docs through a Sloan Foundation training program. In December 2013, Chuck was asked to be a member of the Canadian Association of Research Libraries ARC Steering Committee that developed a framework for a national Data Management Planning online service, a network of centres of expertise on research data management, and a national preservation platform service. In May 2015, CARL launched the Portage Network as its official research data management service. Chuck became this Network’s inaugural director in September 2015.

In June 2010, Chuck was the lead investigator on a University of Alberta Libraries’ application to become a data centre in the Canadian International Polar Year (IPY) Data Assembly Centres Network.  Having been one of the institutions chosen to constitute this Network, the University of Alberta Libraries along with four other centres were responsible for ingesting, managing, and preserving the research data produced from Canadian-funded IPY research between 2007 and 2012.  Working closely with Scholars Portal of the Ontario Council of University Libraries, the University of Alberta Libraries and Scholars Portal assumed responsibility to develop and operate a preservation backbone for this Network.  This collaboration between Scholars Portal and the University of Alberta Libraries is a commitment to the long-term sustainable preservation of the research data from the IPY and of data from future research in the Canadian Arctic.