Curating Research Data: How We Do It Today and How We Might Collaborate in the Future

Abstract

As reproducibility and data sharing emerge as key issues for academic researchers, the data management services offered by the library must grow from consultation and guidance to hands-on data curation and service. For two years the University of Minnesota Libraries have offered a robust service involving multiple data curation specialists that curate data deposited into our Data Repository for the University of Minnesota (DRUM) and appropriate subject data repositories. Data curation steps, including quality assurance, file integrity checks, documentation review, metadata creation for discoverability, and file transformations into archival formats, are value-add services that enhance digital data for long-term preservation and reuse. This talk will explore the data curation workflows and staffing in place at our institution and also highlight procedures in place at disciplinary and institutional such as Dryad, ICPSR, Yale, and the U of New Mexico. These experiences are collected in a new book titled Curating Research Data: A Handbook of Current Practice, released as an open access ebook by the Association of College & Research Libraries in January 2017.