Research Collections and Support
Libraries are increasingly leveraging the raw materials of scholarship and knowledge formation by emphasizing the creation and curation of institutional research assets and outputs, including digitized special collections, research data, and researcher profiles. Our work informs current thinking about research collections and the emerging services that libraries are offering to support contemporary modes of scholarship. We are encouraging the development of new ways for libraries to build and provide these types of collections and deliver distinctive services. Our efforts are focused in the following three areas:
Presentations
Open for all. Reusable for whom? A review of what data reusers want and how data repositories can deliver
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Understanding how data reusers seek and evaluate potential data for reuse will aid data curators, data managers, and developers in the open repository field. We will review past studies of data reusers, specifically a qualitative study of 105 researchers from three disciplinary communities: quantitative social science, archaeology, and zoology. The study identified 12 types of context information that data reusers mention needing when deciding whether to reuse data. Next, we will use the context types to create a feature set and assess how data repositories provide the needed context information to users. Finally, using findings from our assessment, we will showcase desirable features in use to prototype the design of a reuser-oriented data repository that developers can use to improve their data repository interface.
Topics: Research Data Management