Data librarians and archivists from five schools (Duke, Emory, Stanford, UC Berkeley, UCLA) and the ICPSR at the University of Michigan partnered in a pilot working group to perform in-depth curation on a faculty-produced dataset at each institution. We were given access to the ICPSR's internal systems and tools, and guided through their detailed process and workflow to prepare a dataset for ingest into the ICPSR data repository. This panel presentation from the 2014 Research Data Access and Preservation (RDAP) Summit covers our experiences, lessons learned, and future plans for data curation partnerships at the ICPSR and our individual institutions.
What do you do when you are in charge of assessing and reviving an abandoned digital project you had no part in creating or implementing? This article will talk about the unique challenges and issues involved in such a project, drawing from a specific example at the University of Michigan Library. We contended with unfamiliar software, limited technical documentation, proprietary file formats and platform migration, and will discuss how we approached each of these specific technical issues. After reviving our project and reflecting on our process, we put together a list of guidelines that we feel will help assist others who may find themselves in similar situations.
Academic librarians are increasingly engaging in data curation by providing infrastructure (e.g., institutional repositories) and offering services (e.g., data management plan consultation) to support the management of research data on their campuses. Efforts to develop these resources may benefit from a greater understanding of disciplinary differences in research data management needs. After conducting a survey of data management practices and perspectives at our research university, we categorized faculty members into four research domains – arts and humanities, social sciences, medical sciences, and basic sciences – and analyzed variations in their patterns of survey responses. We found statistically significant differences among the four research domains for nearly every survey item, revealing important disciplinary distinctions in data management actions, attitudes and interest in support services. Serious consideration of both the similarities and dissimilarities among disciplines will help guide academic librarians and other data curation professionals in developing a range of data management services that can be tailored to the unique needs of different scholarly researchers.
In 2015, Emory University embarked on a process to identify an appropriate long-term data repository solution for locally-generated research data for which there are not suitable disciplinary repositories. To do so, we formed an internal task force drawing from across the libraries and IT services and representing a wide range of roles and perspectives in our organization. The group identified several possible implementations for long-term data archiving from available platforms. We then worked together to identify and refine our criteria for evaluating the different platforms and to conduct comprehensive evaluations of each system. This presentation will outline the process of how we collaboratively developed our institutional criteria and how we established common evaluation tasks from depositor, administrator, and end-user perspectives. The presentation will also review the evaluators’ experiences conducting assessments in the dynamically developing world of data repository platforms. Finally, I will cover some lessons learned from the experience, including both the advantages and disadvantages to our approach.
Academic libraries are increasingly engaging in data curation by providing infrastructure and services to support the management of research data on their campus. Efforts to develop these resources can benefit from a greater understanding of the social factors that affect how researchers manage their data during and after their research projects. In particular, the age or amount of experience of researchers is often thought to be an important factor influencing their viewpoints on research data sharing and preservation. In this study, we categorized faculty members who responded to our campus-wide survey on research data management into four ranks—professor, associate professor, assistant professor, and non-tenure track— and analyzed differences in their patterns of survey responses. We found statistically significant differences among faculty ranks in familiarity with funding agency requirements for data management plans, reasons that might prevent data sharing, and interest in potential research data services. These findings reveal key distinctions among different ranks of faculty members in their outlook toward research data management, which can help guide academic librarians and data curation professionals to develop research data services that are tailored to the unique needs of specific populations of researchers.
INTRODUCTION The support and curation of research data underlying theses and dissertations are an
opportunity for institutions to enhance their ETD collections. This article describes a pilot data archiving
service that leverages Emory University’s existing Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) program.
DESCRIPTION OF PROGRAM This pilot service tested the appropriateness of Dataverse, a data repository, as
a data archiving and access solution for Emory University using research data identified in Emory University’s
ETD repository, developed the legal documents necessary for a full implementation of Dataverse on campus,
and expanded outreach efforts to meet the research data needs of graduate students. This article also situates
the pilot service within the context of Emory Libraries and explains how it relates to other library efforts
currently underway. NEXT STEPS The pilot project team plans to seek permission from alumni whose data
were included in the pilot to make them available publicly in Dataverse, and the team will revise the ETD
license agreement to allow this type of use. The team will also automate the ingest of supplemental ETD
research data into the data repository where possible and create a workshop series for students who are creating research data as part of their theses or dissertations.