Curation in a Distributed Environment

Broadly speaking, the lack of a framework for organizing, preserving, and making research data available for the long term has resulted in valuable datasets becoming lost or discarded. The approach of the Distributed Data Curation Center of the Purdue University Libraries has been to integrate librarians and the principles of library and archival sciences with domain sciences, computer and information sciences, and information technology to address the challenges of managing collections of research data and to learn how to better support interdisciplinary research through data curation. One piece of infrastructure that supports these activities is a “distributed institutional repository” that includes electronic documents, digitized archival collections, and research datasets housed in multiple systems that are connected together using Web Services and other middleware. Concurrently, roles for librarians and institutional repositories in data curation are being explored. The History of the Well-Run Laboratory You can imagine a bygone time from the history of the well-run laboratory when scientists arrived for work in the morning, put on their lab coats, and checked their lab notebooks out of a locked cabinet. The notebooks were assigned to them individually and contained detailed descriptions of their experiments, parameters, annotations, and results in an orderly, structured format. At the end of the day, they signed and returned their notebooks to the cabinet. The notebooks were preserved in an archive as a part of the scientific record and the annals of the lab. R. A. Baker outlined the regimen for chemistry educators back in 1933: LIBRARY TRENDS, Vol. 57, No. 2, Fall 2008 (“Institutional Repositories: Current State and Future,” edited by Sarah L. Shreeves and Melissa H. Cragin), pp. 191–201 (c) 2009 The Board of Trustees, University of Illinois Institutional Repositories and Research Data Curation in a Distributed Environment