Case Study in Data Curation at Johns Hopkins University

At Johns Hopkins University, the institutional repository (IR) is being developed as a component of an overall digital library architecture that will emphasize long-term preservation. The IR represents a set of services that will be developed to support the identified needs or requirements of faculty and students. Given the research-intensive environment at Johns Hopkins, one particular area of interest relates to data sets from a diversity of disciplines ranging from the humanities to the sciences. Essentially, the IR is being developed as a “gateway” to the underlying digital archive that will support data curation as part of an evolving cyberinfrastructure featuring open, modular components. In addition to this technological framework, Johns Hopkins is developing new roles and relationships between the library and the academic community, most notably through the development of “data scientists” or “data humanists.” These developments reflect the realization that the IR is the first step in a longer journey and that for institutional efforts to be successful, they must be integrated into a larger landscape of repositories that serve a distributed and diverse academic community.