Who’s in Charge? Discovering the Autonomy in an Institutional Data Repository for Research Data Curation and Sharing
Journal
iConference 2020 Proceedings
Date Issued
2020
Author(s)
Abstract
To facilitate data sharing, more and more research data infrastructures have been built. However, less attention is paid to the needs of researchers as data producers in the context of traditional OAIS-compliant institutional data repositories. Meanwhile, researchers usually complete data management tasks themselves throughout the research data lifecycle and express a desire to control the data ingestion process. The contradictory between design and the reality suggests a potential need for autonomy in terms of data curation along with frictions between researchers and professional data curators. In this study, we explore important features of an ideal institutional data repository through designing the NTUData prototype. It is a researcher-centered system that helps integrate the early phases of the data lifecycle into the process of data curation and thus encourage data sharing. Nine participants in the information science field were recruited for a usability test in which the DCP Toolkit was adopted. The results show that researchers prefer to initiate and perform the whole data submission process themselves. They are also concerned about the interoperability to link NTUData to external resources and the interpretability of text labels within this repository. As for their needs towards autonomy, two per- spectives with regards to curating and sharing data can be observed, respectively.
Subjects
Research data infrastructure
Institutional data repository
Data sharing
Autonomy
Data curation profiles
Publisher
iSchools
Type
conference proceedings