Data Curation: A New Frontier in Faculty-Librarian Collaboration

Presenter:

John Potter, Librarian

ITT Technical Institute/Grand Rapids, MI

What is Data Curation?

Protocols and tools to… Provide descriptive analysis of digital

collections & objects In order to augment their discovery,

management, use, reuse, and preservation

Usually through standardized metadata, developing middleware

Why data curation?

Faculty researchers are Not sure how or whether to share dataLack time to organize data setsNeed help describing data for

discoveryWould like new way to manage dataNeed help archiving data

• D Scott Brandt, Purdue University

Benefits of data curation

Facilitates data mining (to make data more accessible)

Shared data can be used, reused and validated by others

Helps secure grant funding (through assurance in preservation)

Saves researchers time, allows for greater focus on research

What do Librarians actually do? Follow uniform metadata practices =>

promotes interoperability

recreate & reorganize data from old software => into new file formats

Build ontologies, hierarchical structures, & interactive thesauri

Help acquire or license datasets for researchers, users

Other possible services:

Create and organize documentation related to data (IR)

Offer digital preservation services

Where is this happening:

University of Illinois MS/LIS has a Data Curation Concentration (2007)

Purdue’s Distributed Data Curation Center (D2C2) For ‘small science’ with unorganized,

disparate, heterogeneous, & distributed data Currently working with biologists and

engineers

Implications:

New orientation for libraries, library profession can speak of added value

Faculty more apt to support library appropriations (see themselves as stakeholders)

View librarianship more on par with faculty status, less clerical

Future: Collaboration to clarify roles and

responsibilities of data management players

Create data publication standards– as in workflow, linking schemes, etc

And data curation prototypes (data integration, analysis, visualization)

Expect competition from Google through http://research.google.com