Incorporating Researcher Data into the Institutional Repository: What Is It About Data That Makes It So Different?

CurateND is the institutional repository and curation system for the University of Notre Dame. It is focused on allowing affiliated individuals to preserve their research and scholarly pursuits to share within a single Fedora-based repository. Since the release of CurateND in spring 2015, multiple teams continue to work to establish a system and interface that is accessible for users to view special library collections, upload scholarly articles, images, and other creative works, while also enabling researchers to share data. While data is but one aspect of a large body of materials, inclusion of data into the repository presents creators with unique challenges. In this presentation, I will discuss changes that we are making to CurateND that are important to facilitate data curation and sharing, and why these specific changes are necessary. I will also address two ways of data ingest, issues surrounding each, and future needs for the system. In coming to understand these changes, I will address methods that we used to compare our repository with others both institutional and otherwise, and how our partnership with a separate open access data repository benefits researcher needs beyond the system. Through our experiences I hope to give a sense of the challenges and benefits to having a repository that is able to provide quality space for data, while simultaneously highlighting special collections and scholarship that is central to documenting the institution’s rich community and history.