Gail Steinhart, co-chair of the working group, forwarded me a link to this paper during the summer, and I’m very pleased to have read it. The group, formed in 2006, has been investigating issues, current activities, and opportunities for the Library to get involved in “digital research data curation.” Thus, it serves as a very useful US equivalent to our DISC-UK State of the Art Review, but also hones in on the specific issues within a given institution, which is what I’d like to help the Information Services do within the University of Edinburgh.

The white paper begins with an environmental scan beyond Cornell, before turning to the strengths and potential areas of collaboration within the University. It looks at the actual and potential role of the academic research library, international organisations such as CODATA, activities in the UK including the importance of Liz Lyon’s 2007 report on roles and responsibilities, the EU DRIVER project, The Australian National Data Service and the activities at Monash University (“noteworthy in terms of utilizing institutional repositories for research data”), and developments in the US including the formation of the federal Interagency Working Group on Digital Data and the DataNet initiative funded by the NSF, as well as recent commercial activities by Sun, Google, and Microsoft. Institutions within the US mentioned for moving forward the state of the art include the San Diego Supercomputer Centre (for SRB, iRODS, and Data Central), Purdue University (for its Distributed Data Curation Centre, D2C2), University of Washington and Johns Hopkins University.

Four US universities are named as pursuing educational opportunities in data curation – Indiana University’s School of Informatics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Syracuse University.

A section on data curation issues covers financial sustainability, appraisal and selection, digital preservation, intellectual property, confidentiality and privacy, and participation by data owners. The recommendations made by the group include the need to seek out and cultivate partnerships, and the need to develop new services for Cornell researchers.

Neil introduces the report as a whole. The part about research data is extracted below:

The activities of the Alliance Initiative are directed to three areas: First, the partners wish to formulate a common data policy in order to promote both the need for action and to demonstrate the usefulness of primary data infrastructures for scientists and scholars.

Secondly, the partners wish to foster cooperation between scientists and information specialists and to offer funding for pilot projects. Such projects should develop subject-specific standards and methods of data curation and archiving; they should also define the division of labour required in the process.

These steps have the overall goal of establishing a reliable system of digital archives for primary research data, and to ensure that these remain accessible internationally and their data reusable in various interdisciplinary contexts.
Finally, the third and ultimate aim is to establish a system of discipline specific, internationally networked data repositories for primary research data. However,
this task can and should only be tackled when sufficient experience has been acquired from the funding and evaluation of pilot projects. This is to ensure that
the new structures respond to the requirements of the individual subject disciplines and are embraced by them.

Quoted: The RIN report "To share or not to share: Publication and quality assurance of research data outputs" (June 2008) presents the findings from a study of whether or not researchers do make their research data available to others, and the issues they encounter when doing so.

The Social Science Data Archive, DANS, Netherlands, has published quality guidelines for data archiving and "making data future-proof." An innovation is that the 17 guidelines apply in turn to data archives, but also data producers and data users.

A short and sweet summary of the Cambridge report sizing up the UK Trading Funds (such as the Met Office, Land Registry and the Ordnance Survey) and their business models. Bottom line? Opening up the data vaults at these agencies "could benefit the economy to the tune of net £164m." Link through to the full report and on to the Guardian's Free Our Data Campaign.

DRIVER, or the Digital Repositories Infrastructure Vision for European Research, is a joint collaboration between ten European partners which aims to create a knowledge base for European research. DRIVER is funded by the EU (FP6) and puts in place a test-bed of digital repositories across
Europe, to assist with the development of a knowledge infrastructure for the European Research Area. The project builds upon existing institutional repositories and national networks, from countries including the Netherlands,
Germany, France, Belgium and the UK.

This is an extensive report in PDF format. Note pages 138 -151 provide an informative overview of data curation tools, procedures, and data quality in an IR environment

This report by the Archaeology Data Service seeks to answer immediate questions regarding cost and to develop recommendations and strategies for archaeologists, researchers, cultural resource managers and archivists dealing with 'Big Data'.

A March 2007 announcement from ICPSR about statistical disclosure control for spatial data that is linked to records of research participants. "While the risk of compromising participant confidentiality increases with such linked data, important new research is made possible because of it. The report suggests methods that will allow this type of research to grow while protecting confidentiality." The report can be browsed, but only downloaded for payment.

Recommendations on the Implementation of an Open Source Digital Archival and Preservation System and on Related Software Development
This report was commissioned by UNESCO Memory of the World Programme and prepared with the support of the Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories (APSR).

Page leads to downloadable word doc (38 pp).