Alfred P. Sloan Foundation grant will fund implementation of shared staffing model across 7 academic libraries and Dryad

We’re thrilled to announce that Dryad will participate in a three-year, multi-institutional effort to launch the Data Curation Network. The implementation — led by the University of Minnesota Libraries and backed by a $526,438 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation — builds on previous work to better support researchers faced with a growing number of requirements to openly and ethically share their research data.

The result of many months of research and planning, the project brings together eight partners:

• University of Minnesota Libraries
• Sheridan Libraries at Johns Hopkins University
• University of Michigan Library
• Duke University Libraries
• University Library at University of Illinois at Urbana­-Champaign
• Cornell University Library
• Penn State University Libraries
• Dryad

Currently, staff at each of these institutions provide their own data curation services. But because data curation requires a specialized skill set — spanning a wide variety of data types and discipline-specific data formats — institutions cannot reasonably expect to hire an expert in each area.

Curation workflow for the DCN

The intent of the Data Curation Network is to serve as a cross-institutional staffing model that seamlessly connects a network of expert data curators to local datasets and to supplement local curation expertise. The project aims to increase local capacity, strengthen cross-institutional collaboration, and ensure that researchers and institutions ethically and appropriately share data.

Lisa R. Johnston, Principal Investigator for the DCN and Director of the Data Repository for the University of Minnesota (DRUM), explains:

Functionally, the Data Curation Network will serve as the ‘human layer’ in a local data repository stack that provides expert services, incentives for collaboration, normalized curation practices, and professional development training for an emerging data curator community.

For our part, the Dryad curation team is excited to join a collegial network of professionals, to help develop shared procedures and understandings, and to learn from the partners’ experience and expertise (as they may learn from ours).

As an independent, non-profit repository, we are especially pleased to get to work more closely with the academic library community, and hope this project can provide a launchpad for future, international collaborations among organizations with similar missions but differing structures and funding models.

Watch this space for news as the project develops, and follow the DCN on Twitter: #DataCurationNetwork