Institutional Repositories and Research Data Curation in a Distributed Environment

Broadly speaking, the lack of a framework for organizing, preserving, and making research data available for the long term has resulted in valuable datasets becoming lost or discarded. The approach of the Distributed Data Curation Center of the Purdue University Libraries has been to integrate librarians and the principles of library and archival sciences with domain sciences, computer and information sciences, and information technology to address the challenges of managing collections of research data and to learn how to better support interdisciplinary research through data curation. One piece of infrastructure that supports these activities is a “distributed institutional repository” that includes electronic documents, digitized archival collections, and research datasets housed in multiple systems that are connected together using Web Services and other middle-ware. Concurrently, roles for librarians and institutional repositories in data curation are being explored.