Data, Data Practices, and Data Curation

In today’s technology-intensive research environments, petabytes of data may be produced in a matter of hours, days, or weeks. Those data may be lost in a similar amount of time if they are not captured, curated, and marked up in ways that allow for discovery and reuse by others. Datasets large and small can be very useful not only to researchers, but also to students, to the general public, and to policy makers. Among the classes of data of broad general interest are scientific records of the climate, the skies and galaxies, plant and animal species, social and economic observations, and cultural and historical records. Research policy by governments and funding agencies encourages – and increasingly requires – that investigators make plans for data management, curation, and dissemination. The National Science Foundation announced a new requirement in 2010 for all grant proposals: they now must include data management plans. In 2012, the White House initiated open access requirements on publications and data for all large federal funding agencies. Similar requirements are in place in the U.K., European Union, and elsewhere. These policies are causing a mad scramble for compliance by researchers, universities, librarians, and archivists. The library and archive communities have issued several reports on their role in dat