50 Survey Results: Survey Questions and Responses
RE scaling to meet increased demand: I’d like to be more optimistic and say we’ll be getting enough
datasets that this will be a challenge over the next 3–5 years, but I’ve thought that for the last 3–5 years
also and we’ve not seen a large enough increase to prevent us from offering these services.
Recruiting is not so hard, but retaining is.
Scaling is and will be the biggest challenge for us.
So far demand has not been a limiting factor.
Some of these issues were more challenging when we began but have since become much easier as
we’ve become more established. The two biggest challenges remain raising awareness of data curation
needs and helping our research community understand that the library offers services to help them.
Another big challenge is recruiting and retaining staff. We’ve had three principal research data
employees recruited by other institutions in the last two years, and one position was in search and
screen for 25 months until we were able to fill it.
The funding models in the current budget constraints that universities are in for the foreseeable future
make it hard. Training and marketing are easy, but long-term commitments are harder to implement
and fund. New models and having researchers aware of what costs to include in grants is an area that
will be a challenge.
We interpret “keeping up with technology changes” as awareness of technology changes, not their
actual implementation. If this question is about upgrading and maintaining systems to keep them
current we would select 4.
We need additional resources and support to keep up with myriad needs in this space. In particular, we
need a dedicated team, including people whose roles are specifically to curate datasets.
We would need to reassign staff and/or hire new positions to support full-scale data curation.
IMPORTANCE OF DATA CURATION SERVICES
While your library may not currently provide data curation services and treatments, the project team
is interested in understanding which curation treatments you and your institution find important. The
following sections will provide a list of treatments and definitions for five categories of data curation
services. Please indicate the importance of these treatments along the specified spectrum.
INGEST ACTIVITIES
Here are descriptions of six data curation ingest activities.
Authentication: The process of confirming the identity of a person, generally the depositor, who is
contributing data to the data repository. (e.g., password authentication or authorization via digital
signature). Used for tracking provenance of the data files.
Chain of Custody: Intentional recording of provenance metadata of the files (e.g., metadata about
who created the file, when it was last edited, etc.) in order to preserve file authenticity when data are
transferred to third parties.
Deposit Agreement: The certification by the data author (or depositor) that the data conform to all
policies and conditions (e.g., do not violate any legal restrictions placed on the data) and are fit for
deposit into the repository. A deposit agreement may also include rights transfer to the repository for
ongoing stewardship.
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