 Hello everyone. My name is Amber Leahy. I'm a data and GIS librarian and the Borealis service director. I will be joined later in this video by my colleague Megan Goodchild. We want to thank C&I for inviting us to talk today and welcome to this project briefing about Canada's new National Dataverse Repository Borealis. Here's a bit of a roadmap outlining what we will be covering today, some background on the project and how we got started, an introduction to the Borealis service, a number of technical initiatives the team is currently working on and the work we are doing to build a robust and engaged community of practice. First, a brief description of the Dataverse software for those who are unfamiliar with it. Dataverse is an open source repository platform developed by the Institute for Quantitative Social Science, IQSS, at Harvard and is used by approximately 80 organizations around the world from small to very large to store, share, publish, and discover research data. It allows researchers to share their data with others in a secure, sightable, and discoverable manner and it was developed with quantitative social science data in mind, but is not limited to a particular domain. Dataverse also provides support for many types of data sets, files, collections, and features. The history of this project reaches back to 2012 with its earlier iteration Scholars Portal Dataverse which began accepting deposits from the 21 University Libraries in Ontario, Canada. At the time there were a range of organizations with interests in research data management services and that has contributed to the formation of a national Dataverse repository. One important driver was the signals coming from Canada's research funding agencies, the tri-agencies around open access and data deposit for funded research which took the form of principles released in 2015 and much later into policies released in 2021. The Canadian Association of Research Libraries, CARL, was also deeply involved in fostering national collaboration through Portage which established a seat for academic libraries in broader national discussions around research data management and advanced computing and created an open framework for libraries to begin collaborating within expert groups in areas related to data management planning, discovery, curation, training, preservation, and tools. The idea of a central instance of Dataverse accessible to all institutions and researchers in Canada emerged from a Portage working group exploring opportunities for establishing a Dataverse North Consortium in 2017 to 2018. Conversations around Dataverse North coincided with discussions around extending the Scholars Portal Dataverse platform to other regional library consortia and ultimately to discussions between OKL and the University of Toronto Libraries about transitioning the Scholars Portal Dataverse to a national service. At the same time Portage was being integrated into a new federally funded organization called the Digital Research Alliance of Canada, the Alliance for Short that continued this work to support the development of an RDM ecosystem in Canada. The establishment of the Borealis Service today is a culmination of efforts which you will hear more about in this presentation. Borealis is a centrally provided infrastructure and technical support for libraries and users where libraries administer their own institutionally branded Dataverse spaces and build local RDM workflows around data deposit and sharing. It is governed in partnership by Canadian Regional Academic Library Consortia. In terms of governance, we focus less on reaching an end state than in creating a process that can support future change and growth. Borealis is still changing in terms of its membership and its relationships with national funders and the governance framework will also no doubt change with time. We'll be highlighting for you next how the infrastructure and community driven initiatives support the development of Borealis as a national repository. In June 2022, Scholars Portal Dataverse was officially renamed to Borealis, the Canadian Dataverse Repository. This new name was the culmination of efforts of a renaming working group which included representation from the Four Regional Academic Library Consortia in Canada and the Digital Research Alliance of Canada. The working group conducted an effective community consultation process including focus groups and meetings with key stakeholders. In addition to the new name, the Borealis team also launched a new logo and website domain Borealis Data.ca with a new look and feel. Borealis' evolution into a national repository collaboration provides academic libraries and research institutions in Canada an opportunity to invest in secure, scalable, reliable, open source repository infrastructure and to foster an open community for both RDM practitioners and researchers. Over the next year, much of the work that has been happening around governance and policy development will transition into a formal structure. Bylaws have been drafted and a group has been struck to develop a process for approval and implementation. And once completed, this formal governance structure will be in place with strong connections to the community. Turning to Borealis infrastructure, all data and repository systems are hosted at the University of Toronto on Canadian Library Storage. Borealis is a fully bilingual platform provided in both English and French. The repository provides open discoverability of research data through open APIs including searching and metadata harvesting and integration with major data aggregators including Google data set search data site and the National Canadian Federated Research Data Repository. Borealis provides restricted data access controls to share data openly or with granular file level restrictions and permissions. Researchers and administrators control the permissions of their data. Integrated visualization tools are available to preview and explore data within the browser. And Borealis has built in a file level preservation including monthly integrity checks to ensure data are reliably stored and backed up. Overall, the repository as a whole is structured into institution specific collections for deposit and sharing. Borealis local administrators can customize collections and provide curation and deposit support to researchers directly within the platform. Borealis data are stored on Canadian secure library hosted storage through the Ontario Library Research Cloud, a geographically distributed cloud storage for research data. File preservation support is provided through monthly file integrity checks in combination with OLRC's storage. Additional data preservation is available through tools such as Archivematica, an open source standard space processing tool for creating well-formed packages for preservation storage. Integration between Dataverse and Archivematica was sponsored by OKL and is open and reusable by anyone in the world. Archivematica processing of Borealis data is available through connected services including Permfrost, an OKL hosted digital preservation service for Canadian libraries. To summarize, Borealis connects institutional library and RDM support administrators to institutional collections where affiliated researchers, research collaborators and data users can get assistance with data curation, deposit, publishing, sharing and accessing research data. The Borealis repository is structured into institutional collections with sub collections and data sets within as well as other sponsored collaborative research project collections and curated library data collections. It connects users to local RDM and data services and through the Borealis administrator community institutional administrators come together to share RDM expertise and knowledge. I'll now pass it over to Megan. Thanks Amber. Borealis released several new policies in 2022 to support the ongoing Core Trust Seal certification project which I'll talk about in just a moment. The Borealis terms of use were updated to reflect new services and new preservation plan outlines the basic file level preservation for all data in Borealis and advanced preservation processing options available to institutions. A new privacy statement informs users what data are collected and how their data and personal information is protected. And a new technology infrastructure and security information statement provides additional information about the technical infrastructure, security, storage and backup details for the service. In terms of usage, Borealis has 65 participating institutions using the repository service for their RDM data deposit and sharing services. There are over 12,000 published data sets and over 220,000 files uploaded and now over 12 million downloads. To date we've seen a sharp increase in the number of deposits in the last three to four years. This chart shows the cumulative number of deposits over the past 10 years since its launch in 2012 which is very exciting. Borealis supports institutional RDM services by providing a dedicated institutional repository collection showcasing institutional research data. Institutional administrators can customize the collections with sub collections, descriptions and links to related RDM services guides and local policies. Authorized researchers log in and are directed to their institutional collections for deposit and sharing. Some institutions provide additional mediated deposit and curation of research data to assist researchers in making their data fair. Researchers are collaborating across institutions and Borealis supports affiliated and sponsored discipline specific collections and research groups to collaborate in depositing and sharing their research data. Sponsored collections support use cases including journal data archiving, historical data digitization and collaborative access to archival data collections and research data shared by affiliated cross-disciplinary research institutes. Many libraries are increasingly using the repository for providing access to and preservation of curated library data and licensed data collections. Borealis supports social science survey data collections with rich data descriptions for social science survey data, geospatial data, Canadian public opinion polls, census data and historical topographic maps. This year we will be migrating the local Odyssey repository and collections to Borealis which I'll talk about in just a moment. Next we would like to share with you some ongoing initiatives to enhance the platform and provide support for collection administrators in the research community. Researchers are increasingly looking for solutions to deposit and share de-identified sensitive data. We'll be participating in a national project led by the Alliance to improve infrastructure and to collaboratively develop policy frameworks to improve workflows and reduce the risk of disclosure as part of deposit and sharing of sensitive data. In response to ongoing feedback from the user community we are also participating in developing the integration between Dataverse and Globus as an external transfer tool to facilitate large file and large volume transfers for upload and download. We are also in the process of migrating Odyssey which is a data service supporting access to social science survey data and public opinion polls for researchers, students, staff and instructors at over 40 academic institutions across Canada. The underlying Nestor server reached end of life therefore migration to Borealis will provide sustainability to the service and will include an integrated discovery catalog as well. We have also been supporting a cohort of institutions and preparing applications for core trust seal certification which requires input from Borealis as a service provider managing the digital infrastructure component of the repository and the institution that manages the policies and procedures associated with their collections. Over the past few years the Borealis team has been collaborating with the Dataverse North Expert Group to cultivate a community of institutional Dataverse collection administrators now known as the Borealis Dataverse Administrators Community. The goal of the community is to share knowledge and build capacity of the administrators to support their local research community. An important achievement was the creation of spaces for the exchange of knowledge and to share feedback including monthly meetings and a listserv as forums for discussion. A major milestone was incorporating bilingual community meetings and support thanks to hiring staff at Borealis and at the Alliance. Both roles are crucial to offer a more inclusive community spaces and support. In collaboration with the Borealis team the Dataverse North community has developed important resources such as training modules guides and policy templates and these provide important tools to share knowledge. The feedback from the community has been directly used to channel insights and to development efforts to improve the software and tools and also to create new resources for the community. Now moving to community initiatives there are some ongoing initiatives that include the Dataverse Canadian Dataverse admin survey which is a collaboration between Borealis and the Dataverse North Expert Group. The project is to survey Canadian Dataverse administrators to develop a better understanding of this group who they are their institutional contexts the service models they support their experiences using the Dataverse software and the challenges they face in supporting researchers. The aim is to help design programs and plan initiatives that would benefit this community as well as develop a greater understanding of institutional data deposit and sharing services within a national context. Borealis has also been collaborating on community initiatives including knowledge sharing and training events. We've started a new Learn with Borealis series that will cover specific topics. Our first session booked in February is an intro to APIs that will provide basic overview of the Dataverse APIs and overview of resources, hands-on demos using different tools and also research use cases. Other sessions include Dataverse collection admin panels on various topics and new joiner sessions as an intro to the service to help set up an institutional collection for admins. In terms of future developments the Borealis team is working on a number of projects. We have been involved with investigating how to improve support and infrastructure for research conducted by and with Indigenous communities including exploring ways Borealis could support data sovereignty principles and also participating in efforts to incorporate traditional knowledge labels that identify and clarify community specific rules and responsibilities regarding access and future use of traditional knowledge. We're also exploring ways to improve the integration of Borealis within research workflows including improved interoperability through the implementation of standards such as controlled vocabularies and other metadata standards. Additionally we are investigating possibilities of connecting Borealis to other types of research software and storage such as trusted remote storage so stay tuned for those developments. I would just like to take a moment to acknowledge our fantastic team at Borealis which includes librarians, developers and system administrators. We also receive support from a number of members of the scholars portal team who assist with everything from upgrades to support tickets to strategic planning. I would also like to acknowledge our partners who have supported the Borealis service in the past and also into the future including academic libraries, regional library consortia, research organizations and the Digital Research Alliance of Canada. So thank you very much. Thank you so much for your attention today. Please feel free to reach out to us if you have any questions. You can use the contact form at borealisdata.ch reach us. Thanks again.