Digital Data Curation: Investigating Potential Collaboration Between Librarians and Researchers

Increasingly, researchers and librarians are faced with questions related to digital data preservation and access. Questions include where data sets of various sizes can be stored, whether to share the data, and if so, with whom, as well as how to discover and access data sets. Problems are compounded by the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of research, and by emerging requirements related to storage of digital data that are generated by government sponsored research. As universities begin to create institutional repositories for both literature and data sets generated by their own researchers, it is appropriate for librarians to become more involved in the process.

Purdue University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have recently begun research, supported by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), to analyze researchers' needs related to sharing, archiving, and disseminating various levels of research data. Research methods include interviews with researchers, observations, and case studies of data practices and work flows in order to develop data curation “profiles”. From these profiles, a matrix will be developed relating curation needs for particular types of data sets, and user needs for systems requirements that could be implemented by data repositories. This talk will present the background, the research process, and current progress of the research, especially as it relates to the geosciences.