Research Data Curation @ CIDR

The Research Data Curator provides technical services for data acquisitions. Library technical services specialize in acquiring, organizing and preserving all kinds of library materials. Recently, data curation has emerged as a new type of library technical service.

Data are unique digital materials with specific curation needs, and require beginner-to-intermediate programming skills. Because of these requirements, the Research Data Curator is located in the Center for Interdisciplinary Digital Research. The CIDR staff provide instruction, consulting, and development support for data intensive research and digital scholarship. If there are data processing or ETL tasks with which the Research Data Curator needs assistance, they can consult the CIDR developers, academic technology specialists or Head of SSDS. The CIDR staff also provides substantial support to patrons using library data collections. Because they work adjacently, the Research Data Curator can provide the CIDR staff with detailed information about the data collections it supports; and, at the same time, the CIDR staff can share use cases that inform data curation workflows.

The Research Data Curator collaborates heavily with the Acquisitions and Metadata departments (Technical Services & Access Division) and humanities and social science bibliographers (Collections Division) during the data acquisitions workflow. They also collaborate with Digital Library Systems and Services (DLSS) to integrate tools like Globus and the Stanford Digital Repository into data curation workflows.

Some recent data curation projects include:

• The New York Times TDM Archive
• Core Logic Datasets Collection
• Gallup Public Opinion Polls, including Gallup World Poll and Gallup Poll Social Series
• L2 Voter and Demographic Dataset
• Washington Post Archival Data