Building a \u27data repository\u27 for heterogenous technical research communities through collaborations

The paper describes the project ‘3TU.Datacentrum’, an initiative of the libraries of the three Dutch Technical Universities. Its aim is to build a data curation facility for the improvement of data management, providing data curation services for data producers of the Technical Universities and enabling data reuse. The libraries initiated this project in their function as information- and knowledge brokers in emerging e-science. Playing a role in the management of research data offers an opportunity to get more thoroughly involved in the scientific process and to interconnect research data with all other sources managed by the libraries. The project builds on the experience from previous TU Delft research (E-Archive and Darelux). Initial interviews with managers and researchers in leading research areas of the Technical Universities were followed by in-depth investigation of the benefits and barriers for data producers. Additional work with research groups in technology- and engineering science confirmed the need for collaboration in data management. Data producers from these heterogeneous research communities identified benefits for data producers in three clusters: quality improvement, increase in research impact and efficiency (saving time on administration). Building the data curation infrastructure and setting up the data librarianship were the primary challenges for the library staff. In collaboration with national and international ‘colleagues’ of the data center the project is currently expanding the data set collection and selecting and developing formal license agreements, guidelines and tools, data citability, as well as selection and usage criteria for long-term access to and preservation of research data. Preliminary conclusions are that while the data curation principle is easily adopted, the data producers will not as easily invest their time in data archiving. Building a data curation facility to meet the diverse needs of heterogeneous research communities requires considerable efforts that can only be realized by (inter)national collaboration between data centers and data users