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.

Open Access to and Reuse of Research Data –
The State of the Art in Finland

Motivated by OECD's open access guidelines (and funded by the Ministry of Education) the Finnish Data Archive carried out an online survey targeting professors of human sciences, social sciences and behavioural sciences in Finnish universities. The aim of this survey was to chart how the universities in Finland have organised the depositing of digital research data and to what extent the data are reused by the scientific community after the
original research has been completed.

Professors were asked, for example, whether their department had any guidelines on the preservation of digital research data. A great majority (90%) said no.

The URL of this article is: http://www.fsd.uta.fi/julkaisut/julkaisusarja/FSDjs07_OECD_en.pdf

Canada currently has no nationally adopted standards or policies governing how research data is collected, catalogued, or preserved. A new collaborative effort has been set up to address the challenges surrounding the access and preservation of this data. The Research Data Strategy (RDS) Working Group is a multi-disciplinary group of universities, institutes, libraries, granting agencies, and individual researchers with a shared recognition of the pressing need to deal with Canadian data management issues.

Sun Microsystems sponsored conference on storage and preservation in San Francisco, May 2008. Article describes keynote speech by Librarian of Stanford University.

PRONOM is a resource for anyone requiring impartial and definitive information about the file formats, software products and other technical components required to support long-term access to electronic records and other digital objects.

This study investigated costs to Higher Education Institutions of the preservation of research data and developed guidance to HEFCE and institutions on these issues. It also provided a methodological foundation on research data costs for the forthcoming HEFCE-sponsored feasability study for a UK research Data Service.

The Data Preservation Alliance for the Social Sciences (Data-PASS) is a broad-based partnership devoted to identifying, acquiring and preserving data at-risk of being lost to the social science research community. Examples of at-risk data include opinion polls, voting records, large-scale surveys on family growth and income, and many other social science studies....

A new blog from the JISC team that manages a number of programmes including ours - the Repositories and Preservation Programme.

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