Collaborating to Manage Research Data

This session at CNI Fall Forum 2013 provides Notre Dame’s experience as a case study to provision research data curation and access services. Managing research outputs becomes a tall order of many universities, given their determined agenda to pursue research excellence. In a world of increasingly data-intensive research, data are rising as a critical component of scholarly communication, often mandated by granting agencies. Data curation, preservation, and access are paramount to the university academic mission, and academic and research libraries are some of the few entities of the universities that carry out such functions; however, libraries’ enduring commitments in print and current operations, and complex campus organizations, often hinder their ability to quickly respond to the data needs of the academy. Notre Dame’s investment in research was recently reinforced by the University’s approval of the expansion of 10 disciplines, such as computational data, adult stem cell research, and nuclear physics. There is a great need for support for research data on campus. The Hesburgh Libraries has been building an institutional digital repository since winter 2012. To respond to the emerging trends, in June 2013 the Libraries switched to a user-centered, agile approach to develop data curation and access services. The goal remains to accept all scholarly outputs (text, images, video and audio), but with an imminent emphasis on research support, and the strategy is to grow, simultaneously, data curation services and the user base, and to build success stories to drive adoptions along the way. Early adopters were identified with the help of subject librarians, and they determined the most critical baseline features for the Libraries to develop. Hydra open source solutions were also leveraged, and Notre Dame collaborated with Northwestern University, Indiana University, and the University of Virginia to create a new community shared Institutional Repository (IR) system. Early adopters have been piloting features since summer 2013, and a full rollout is planned by November 2014. This session will include the project’s development philosophy to overcome resource shortages to meet high demands on research support, the strategy to reach and develop a user base and roadmap, insights on faculty’s needs for research support, the methodology to leverage and contribute to open source tools, and a quick demo of the curation tool.