Texas Data Repository: A Collaboration Case Study

Abstract

The Texas Data Repository is a platform for publishing and archiving datasets (and other data products) created by faculty, staff, and students at Texas higher education institutions. The repository (https://dataverse.tdl.org/) is built in an open-source application called Dataverse, developed and used by Harvard University.

The repository is hosted by the Texas Digital Library, a consortium of academic libraries in Texas with a proven history of providing shared technology services that support secure, reliable access to digital collections of research and scholarship. Texas Digital Library hosts the Texas Data Repository centrally as a single instance Dataverse, an open source platform and community run out of Harvard University’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science. The repository is managed collectively and collaboratively by a steering committee made up of library liaisons appointed by each participating institution.

The Texas Data Repository Steering Committee members, and the institutions they represent, work together to develop priorities for the repository. Each of the individuals involved and their institutions have benefited from having a resource available to them built within the library and research data management community, by professionals aligned with their values, at a fraction of the cost that would be necessary for separate institutional solutions.

Ten academic institutions across Texas currently subscribe to the service, providing a place for their faculty and researchers on campus a place to deposit and share or publish their datasets. Depending on local policy, researchers can create their own collections or dataverses, deposit their data and supplementary information about their data, and either share it with trusted colleagues or publish it, getting themselves a DOI for the dataset so that others can use and cite it reliably.

Currently the repository has more than 200 dataverse and approximately 650 datasets, comprising more than 10,000 individual files.

Looking to deepen collaboration both within and outside of Texas, Texas Digital Library has joined the Global Dataverse Community Consortium. Formed in 2018, the Global Dataverse Community Consortium organizes existing community efforts such as Texas Digital Library’s Texas Data Repository at an international level. In our role as charter members, Texas Digital Library will assist in governance, planning, and creation of the Consortium’s mission and vision statements. The global consortium will also act as a collaborative hub for institutions like TDL to leverage economies of scale in support of Dataverse repositories around the world. That means members of the Texas Data Repository will play a key role in driving a global approach to support data repositories around the world.