Data Curation – Question 1

I am the Digital Archivist for the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia. We collect materials in many areas, but primarily we are concerned with humanities and social sciences (broadly speaking). This means that I work with everything from 20-year-old floppy disks that might contain the work of a contemporary novelist, to hard drives of architectural design files …

Three factors shape my perspective on data curation: my research interest in the changes in knowledge production over time and across domains; the goals of my CLIR/DLF postdoctoral fellowship; and the mission and activities of the research center where I work, the Data to Insight Center (D2I) at Indiana University Bloomington.

As Digital Archivist, my main responsibilities and most immediate priorities concern the management of born-digital materials acquired in archival collections. Over the past year, I have focused on building a foundation of policies, procedures, and workflows to guide the process of acquiring digital materials from donors and establishing initial administrative, physical, and intellectual control over these materials.

In my current position, data curation is part of the larger design problem of how to use digital tools and methodologies to accomplish innovative humanities research. I am a librarian trained in digital humanities and data curation now working in both an academic research library (University of Maryland Libraries) and in a leadership position at a successful digital humanities center (the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities). My job involves data curation as part of strategic planning, project development, teaching and training, and, most generally, producing public research that others can build upon, continue, and enrich.