Steps Toward Implementation of Data Curation Services at Oregon State University Libraries

At the 2010 Library Administration retreat, Professor Chadwell proposed that the Libraries “become a strategic partner in the research endeavors of OSU, especially related to e-science.” Professor Butcher later charged Professors Chadwell and Boock with investigating appropriate roles for the Libraries relating to data curation of the university’s research data, building on the Research & Innovative Services report published in February 2009: OSU Libraries and Research Dataset Curation. In this white paper, we describe work that was done in the last fiscal year, provide brief background information, touch on current data curation efforts at OSU and elsewhere and provide four broad recommendations for ways that OSU Libraries can support research and researchers at OSU by engaging in data curation-related activities in the coming academic year: \ud \ud 1. Investigate library capacity for data curation and develop local infrastructure and policies.\ud a. Establish policies for the types of data that the Libraries will support and the levels of support that the Libraries will offer.\ud b. Work with at least one college or academic unit to curate student research data vis-à-vis the final theses and dissertations in ScholarsArchive@OSU.\ud c. Work with additional faculty to curate research data associated with their final research publications in ScholarsArchive@OSU.\ud d. Investigate library management and assignment of DOIs to faculty datasets.\ud \ud 2. Assign data curation responsibilities to the new Center for Digital Scholarship and build staff capabilities to work with faculty on their data.\ud a. Hire Data Services Librarian to report to new Center for Digital Scholarship department.\ud b. Continue to work with GWLA to make professional development available to OSU Libraries staff. \ud c. Add data curation activities to charge of the Digital Repositories Work Group.\ud d. Build data curation workflows and train library faculty and staff to undertake data curation responsibilities.\ud \ud 3. Identify methods for ensuring broadest possible access to university research data.\ud a. Continue to develop data dictionary for data sets in order to describe data so that it is understandable, harvestable, searchable and easily renderable using geospatial and other visualization tools.\ud b. Evaluate capabilities of current digital infrastructure to support curation of research data.\ud c. Ensure that appropriate Oregon related datasets captured in ScholarsArchive@OSU can be searched and/or rendered in Oregon Explorer. \ud \ud 4. Continue to partner with others, both on and off campus, in order to meet the challenges of data curation for the university.\ud a. Continue to seek grant funding for tool creation in support of data curation.\ud b. Participate in Greater Western Library Alliance, MetaArchive West and Orbis Cascade Alliance data curation activities.\ud c. Terry, Faye and Michael meet with Associate Deans of colleges to describe data curation work that is being done in the Libraries and identify additional areas where we might assist them with research data produced within their colleges.\ud d. Identify opportunities to collaborate with other units on campus interested in data curation including the Graduate School, Institute for Natural Resources, Research Office, NACSE, College of Science, College of Forestry, HMSC.\ud e. Partner with the University of Oregon in the creation and use of data dictionaries, metadata standards, policies, needs assessments, faculty surveys, staff training and best practices related to data curation