NSF Award
1152481
Large-scale science and engineering campaigns have typically considered data management from the inception of the project and funds for data management have been included in the projects' budgets. This proposal is aimed at data acquisition and curation strategies in support of single PI or small group research projects at academic institutions, data in the so-called "long tail". Long-term data management in these projects is much more problematic and particularly acute. Smaller research projects are often strapped for funds to conduct the research that generates the data; management of the data was in the past often an afterthought. With data management plans now being required by funding agencies, the issues must be considered as part of a proposal, but the funding available for date management is still frequently small and economical resources available to researchers still need to be cultivated. At academic institutions, the institutional repository (IR) has emerged as the means of harnessing technology to improve scholarly communication and it is the IR that offers the potential to address the data curation problems of smaller projects. Although institutional repositories have a broad intuitive appeal to all the stakeholders involved with science and engineering data management, they have met with very limited acceptance in practice. This proposal seeks to increase faculty contribution of their data to the IR by appealing to their needs directly and providing them with tools and support for developing personal repositories that can subsequently be federated into the IR. The strategy is to lower the barrier of entry to archiving facilities and to provide incentives for researchers to participate.<br/><br/>Broader impacts will be realized in two key areas. First, archive and preservation of datasets will be enhanced by increasing the participation of faculty and researchers generating data at the nation's research institutions. Second, open source software well be available for deployment by other institutions beyond the project's partners thereby increasing the effectiveness of dataset archiving and sharing across a growing set of participating institutions. The project will also offer research and training opportunities to undergraduate and graduate students involved as software developers and data consultants who interact with faculty and other researchers as part of the project.
