Data curation at ECDL 2010

University of GlasgowAt the most recent ECDL conference in Glasgow (Scotland) there was a panel discussion on data curation called Developing services to support research data management and sharing. Below are some of the things I learned:

  • My take-away from Sara Jone‘s (DDC) remarks was, “There are no incentives for sharing research data”, and when given the opportunity for sharing data owners react by saying things like, “I’m giving my baby away… I don’t know the best practices… What are my roles and responsibilities?”
  • Veerle Van den Eynden (United Kingdom Data Archive) outlined how she puts together infrastructure, policy, and support (such as workshops) to create successful data archives. “infrastructure + support + policy = data sharing” She enumerated time, attitudes and privacy/confidentiality as the bigger challenges.
  • Robin Rice (EDINA) outlined services similar to Van den Eynden’s but was particularly interested in social science data and its re-use. There is a much longer tradition of sharing social science data and it is definitely not intended to be a dark archive. He enumerated a similar but different set of barriers to sharing: ownership, freedom of errors, fear of scooping, poor documentation, and lack of rewards.
  • Rob Grim (Tilburg University) was the final panelist. He said, “We want to link publications with data sets as in Economists Online, and we want to provide a number of additional services against the data.” He described data sharing incentive, “I will only give you my data if you provide me with sets of services against it such as who is using it as well as where it is being cited.” Grim described the social issues surrounding data sharing as the most important. He compared & contrasted sharing with preservation, and re-use with archiving. “Not only is it important to have the data but it is also important to have the tools that created the data.”

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