Data Curation: the Processing of Data

Responsibility for data curation rests, in different ways, on a number of different professional roles. Increasingly, within the library, data curation responsibilities are being associated with specific jobs (with titles like “data curator” or “data curation specialist”), and the rise of specialized training programs within library schools has reinforced this process by providing a stream of qualified staff to fill these roles. At the same time, other kinds of library staff have responsibilities that may dovetail with (or even take the place of) these specific roles: for instance, metadata librarians are strongly engaged in curatorial processes, as are repository managers and subject librarians who work closely with data creators in specific fields. Different techniques and different organizations are engaged in data curation. Finally, it is increasingly being recognized that the data creators themselves (faculty researchers or library staff) have a very important responsibility at the outset: to follow relevant standards, to document their work and methods, and to work closely with data curation specialists so that their data is curatable over the long term.