A Consortial Response to Data Sharing: The TDL Data Management Pilot Project
Abstract
In February 2013 the federal Office of Science and Technology Policy issued a mandate requiring federal funding agencies that spend at least $100 million per year on research and development to mandate public access to the metadata, published research, and data outputs that result from this funding. In response to the OSTP mandate and to the stated needs of its member libraries, the Texas Digital Library began to plan for a consortially developed and run data management service that would meet the requirements of the mandate and position libraries to play a crucial role in on-going conversations about data management at their universities.
A working group of representative TDL member schools and the Texas Advanced Computing Center began meeting in Fall 2013 to create a cross-institutional pilot project to ingest and make data accessible on the web.
The goals of this pilot are:
To create services that meet emerging federal requirements for data and research publication for federally-funded research projects.
To design and integrate a system for curating and managing data that support novel interdisciplinary research.
To design services that will support the dissemination of research to the public in ways that are useful and effective in meeting the goals of the member institutions.
The group is working with environmental science research groups identified at Texas A&M University to ingest data in a variety of formats, develop and apply metadata to maximize discovery, measure access and usage, and track costs.
The project will build on existing TDL technologies and resources, including hosted DSpace institutional repositories, DuraCloud, and large-scale storage at the Texas Advanced Computing Center. It will deploy these resources strategically to develop a working service and identify areas of need for future development.
The pilot project will be completed in the fall of 2014. This presentation will provide an overview of the project and the group’s assumptions in taking it on, our progress to date, and information about the challenges faced thus far.