Contouring Curation for Disciplinary Difference and the Needs of Small Science

Palmer, Carole L.

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/9715 Copy

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Title

Contouring Curation for Disciplinary Difference and the Needs of Small Science

Author(s)

Palmer, Carole L.

Issue Date

2008-10

Keyword(s)

• data curation
• institutional repositories
• Scholarly collaboration
• digital collections
• scientific collaboration

Abstract

Empirical studies of the information practices and needs of scientists date back to at least the 1940s. This work has increasingly focused on identifying differences across disciplines, but it has been primarily concerned with information seeking, retrieval, and use of the literature, and more recently on searching of web-based documents. Studies of scientific data practices are in their infancy, relatively speaking, yet they are essential for guiding development of data curation principles and repository services. Current data curation research at CIRSS is taking multiple approaches to studying data practices and curation requirements within and across sciences, to build our understanding of how data repositories can best facilitate future interdisciplinary and multi-scale science. This presentation will highlight the comparative approach being applied in the Curation Profiles Project, a partnership between Purdue University Libraries and CIRSS, to analyze scientific workflows and research outputs in twelve disciplines, to identify needs for discovery, access, usage, and re-use of data. Three additional studies that address problems associated with moving small science “research” collections into “resource” level repositories will also be discussed. A case study in neuroscience provides insights into the emergent roles of shared disciplinary data repositories, a survey of environmental scientists demonstrates the complexities of supporting diverse institution-based research communities, and a cultural heritage digital aggregation project foregrounds important problems representing scale, granularity, context, and long-term analytical potential in large-scale collections of collections.

Type of Resource

text

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http://hdl.handle.net/2142/9715

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