Oya Y. Rieger is a senior strategist on Ithaka S+R’s Libraries, Scholarly Communication, and Museums team. She spearheads projects that reexamine the curation and preservation missions of cultural heritage organizations and explore sustainability models for open scholarship. Prior to joining Ithaka S+R, Rieger served as Associate University Librarian at Cornell University Library overseeing digital scholarship, preservation, collection development and scholarly publishing programs. As digital preservation has been a central point of her 25-year career, she has contributed to a range of international initiatives to design, develop, and assess digital preservation initiatives and training programs. With a B.A in Economics (Middle East Technical University, Turkey), she holds an M.S. in Public Administration (University of Oklahoma, US), an M.S. in Information Systems (Columbia University, US), and a Ph.D. in Human-Computer Interaction (Cornell University, US). 

KEYNOTE：Documenting the Pandemic: Archiving the Present for Future Research, Policy, and Practice

Since the outbreak of the pandemic, researchers from all around the world have been mobilized to help understand and combat COVID-19. Given the prevalence of information and communication technologies, the communities have been inundated by multimodal information about various aspects of the pandemic, involving text, image, video, and speech.  The sources vary, expanding from governmental agencies to research institutions, from policy makers to advocacy groups. Although “big data” tends to get the most attention due to its scale, prominence, and potential to advance public health strategies, the long tail of research data (aka “small data”) constitutes richly diverse and heterogeneous evidence that captures many sociological, political, economic, historic, and cultural aspects of the pandemic. What are some of the lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic about making both big and small data discoverable, accessible, and usable to a range of scholars and the general public? How can we preserve these rich and diverse sources of information not only for future generations but also for those who will be examining various aspects of the pandemic in the near future? What does it take to provide enduring access to trusted, well-documented, and diverse data so that we can learn from the present experiences to design a better future?