Community is fundamental to the Data Curation Network (DCN). We are librarians, curators, and archivists who strongly believe that as a community we can leverage our distributed curation or domain expertise to enhance and curate the research data being created at our institutions.
To achieve a shared staffing model for the curation of datasets, the DCN has developed a vision that includes community at its core. This vision will be used over the coming months to direct the work of the DCN.
- By using standards-driven data curation techniques the Data Curation Network will become a valued and trusted entity (among researchers, publishers, funding agencies, and beyond) with practical and transparent workflows and infrastructure.
- With a proven and appealing value-proposition, the Data Curation Network will expand into a sustainable entity that grows beyond our initial six partner institutions.
- Datasets curated by the Data Curation Network are used to advance research and education in ways that are measurably of greater reuse value than non-curated data.
- By sharing tools, providing a pipeline for training data curators, and promoting data curation practices across the profession the Data Curation Network will build an innovative community that enriches capacities for data curation writ large.
This vision was developed by project team members at the kick-off meeting June 30-July 1, 2016. Held on the University of Minnesota Twin Cities campus, the meeting brought together team members from Cornell University, the University of Illinois, the University of Michigan, the University of Minnesota, and Washington University in St. Louis to create the DCN charter and set project goals.
In the coming months, a virtual sandbox will be created to allow community members to engage with the network and curation models. We are currently seeking curators and librarians nationwide to provide feedback on the curation model, track standard baseline metrics, test workflows, and conduct researcher assessments, to name a few. If you, or your institution, are interested in working with us on these topics in the future, please fill out this form and we will be in touch shortly.
A full report of the outputs of the meeting is available on the DCN website: https://sites.google.com/site/datacurationnetwork/results.