CLIR/DLF Report Highlights Need for Data Curation Education

Data curation is a growing challenge for research and scholarship, but few researchers are prepared to deal with the challenge, according to a new report from the Council on Library and Information Resources and the Digital Library Federation. The report, The Problem of Data, examines data management and curation practices among university researchers and the current state of data curation education.

“The massive scale of data creation and accumulation, together with increasing dependence on data in research and scholarship, are profoundly changing the nature of knowledge, discovery, organization, and reuse,” writes CLIR President Chuck Henry in his introduction. Yet we are responding with considerable difficulty to “what may be the most complex and urgent contemporary challenge for research and scholarship.”

In part one of the report, Lori Jahnke and Andrew Asher examine data curation practices among scholars at five institutions of higher education. Jahnke, anthropology librarian at Emory University and former CLIR postdoctoral fellow, and Asher, digital initiatives coordinator and scholarly communications officer at Bucknell University, conducted ethnographic interviews of graduate students, faculty, and researchers in a range of social science disciplines. Among their key findings:

-- None had received formal training in data management practices, nor did they express satisfaction with their level of expertise
-- Few researchers think about long-term preservation of their data
-- The demands of publication output overwhelm long-term considerations of data curation
-- There is a great need for more effective collaboration tools, as well as online spaces that support the volume of data generated and provide appropriate privacy and access controls
-- Few researchers are aware of the data services that the library might be able to provide.

In part two of the report, Spencer D. C. Keralis, director of the Digital Scholarship Co-Operative at the University of North Texas and former CLIR postdoctoral fellow, provides a snapshot of the current state of data curation education. He finds that while LIS and iSchool programs are making efforts to develop data curation curricula “much work still needs to be done to prepare LIS graduates for roles as data professionals in and out of libraries.” He adds that “the LIS world largely remains a closed circuit, providing concentrations within tracks restricted to LIS enrollees.” Keralis notes that the trend in emerging curriculum development programs is to open up this closed circuit and allow post-baccalaureate students and professionals to take courses in data curation.

The report, available in electronic format only, can be accessed at http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub154.

The report’s release coincides with the conclusion of a two-week immersion seminar for CLIR and CLIR/DLF postdoctoral fellows, the second week of which focuses on data curation.

Related resources:

Read CLIR/DLF Digital Curation Fellow Inna Kouper's blog from Digital Curation Week 
http://connect.clir.org/CLIR/Blogs/BlogViewer/?BlogKey=13436e05-25bc-4fe1-b506-592c02e6b9f7

View Sayeed Choudhury's discussion of the "stack model" for digital management developed by the Data Conservancy
http://www.clir.org/initiatives-partnerships/data-curation

Kathlin Smith
Director of Communications
CLIR
1707 L Street, NW #650
Washington, DC 20036

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