DATA CURATION EDUCATION IN RESEARCH CENTERS

Data-intensive, multidisciplinary geoscience research is predicated on the broad availability of high quality collections of digital data sets. Creating, maintaining, and sustaining such data collections requires a trained workforce of data curation professionals. The current data curation workforce consists primarily of individuals who have been educated through on-the-job training. The Data Curation Education in Research Centers (DCERC) program is investigating a new model for educating data professionals to contribute to scientific research. DCERC is a collaboration between the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Graduate School of Library and Information Science, the University of Tennessee School of Information Sciences, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research. The program is organized around a foundational course in data curation and field experiences in research and data centers for both master’s and doctoral students.

This presentation will outline the aims and the structure of the DCERC program and discuss results and lessons learned from the first two sets of summer internships in 2012 and 2013. Five master’s students worked with both data mentors and science mentors at NCAR, gaining first hand experiences in the issues, methods, and challenges of scientific data curation. They engaged in a diverse set of projects with both analog and digital data, including data processing, documentation, and archiving processes. The students learned current data management practices and challenges while developing expertise and conducting research. They also made important contributions to NCAR data and science teams by evaluating data management workflows, preparing data sets to be archived, and developing recommendations for particular data management activities. Additional master’s student interns will return in summer of 2014, and two Ph.D. students will conduct data curation-related dissertation fieldwork during the 2013-2014 academic year.