(11 May 2016) Primary Research Group surveyed college and university and other research libraries in the United Kingdom and United States to find out more about their approach to data curation. Ten libraries were surveyed in each country. Two non-academic libraries with profiles similar to academic libraries were also included.
The study presents a broad range of data on budgets, staffing, assessment, technology use, interdepartmental cooperation, metadata development, data security, discovery tools, marketing, archiving, data preservation and other aspects of data curation management. Some of the participating institutions include: Tulane, Syracuse University, the University of New Mexico, Imperial College London, the University of Edinburgh, the University of Bath, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, the University of London, the Center for Research Libraries and Arizona State University.
Just a few of the 108 page report’s many findings are that:
The majority of libraries (70%) surveyed assisted faculty with advice on how to develop data management plans for grants or personal use.
- ·For 30% of the UK libraries surveyed, data curation was a line item in the library budget.
The mean average percentage of overall data management staff time spent on the development of metadata and other cataloguing issues was 31 per cent.
- ·PRG asked about the number of grant proposals that had been reviewed or contributed to by data curation office or service in the past year. The mean average was 15.38. However, the numbers were much higher in the United States than in the UK. US libraries reported a mean average of 21.4 compared to 5.33.
Institutions cited by survey participants for having particularly admirable data curation services were: Edinburgh, Bristol, Cambridge, Leeds, Oxford, Southampton and Loughborough universities in the UK and Purdue, Johns Hopkins, Michigan, Illinois, California, Minnesota and Oregon universities in the United States.
More here.
