A partnership between Data Curation Network and the Journal of eScience Librarianship

Share your ideas, experiences, and expertise with data curation or closely related topics!

In August 2021, the Data Curation Network partnered with the Journal of eScience Librarianship to produce a special issue: Data Curation in Practice. In this issue, data stewards shared recommended practices, data curation primers, and lived experiences to demonstrate how curatorial activities optimize research outputs (e.g., data, software, and code) for reuse. This issue provided a needed platform to share and describe approaches for curating research data. We hope to continue the spirit of the issue in providing a space to further explore the curation of research data and other closely related practices that may intersect with it.

The work of data curation crosses disciplines and professions. In libraries it is often adjacent to performing other data specialties, such as research data management, liaison librarianship support, or other services aimed at facilitating research and enabling communities to make data more discoverable and reusable. It’s also dependent on skilled developers to create and maintain infrastructures to enable curation and data sharing; library specialists who support purchasing, licensing, or training on software; and numerous other service roles that provide services or connections within our communities. In addition to curatorial techniques, we welcome columns about connections between data curation and related services in support of research data publication and reuse. 

Introducing the Curatorial Connections Column!

In this recurring column, to be published in every regular issue of JeSLIB, the editors request articles on how information professionals are implementing data curation practices, workflows for institutions and repositories, and ideas for improving data curation practices, and more. Share your personal experiences, forge a new path, strike a hot iron, or perhaps even try a different approach to publishing, such as through digital art or multimedia efforts. We welcome contributions that describe technical solutions, case studies and practical examples, emotional labor and ‘soft skills’ work, and everything in-between. We also welcome collaborative contributions, such as two shorter columns that might offer differing viewpoints on the same topic. 

This column will be edited by Hannah Hadley, Princeton University, hhadley@princeton.edu, and Mikala Narlock, Data Curation Network, mnarlock@umn.edu. Anyone wishing to propose a column should visit the Author Guidelines for more information and submit an abstract (>250 words) via the submission form (https://z.umn.edu/jeslib-column-proposal). Additionally, an author may email the column editors to discuss an idea. Areas of focus include, but are not limited to:

  • Data curation primers and primer updates to previously published primers
  • Data curation best practices 
  • Thoughtful observations / Community calls for action
  • Curation case studies for specific data types and/or formats
  • Tool reviews (such as the Excel Archival Tool, STATtransfer, HashMyFiles, etc.)
  • Real-life curation workflows 
  • Exploratory ideas and pilot projects for more effectively curating data 
  • Incorporating ethical, sustainable, and accessibility considerations into curation practices
  • Experiences that cross librarianship
  • Experiences that extend beyond libraries, into government, museums, funders, etc.

We are also interested in a variety of formats of publications, such as:

  • Videos or photographic essays
  • Images/Models/Workflow diagrams
  • Code 
  • Texts/manuscripts 
  • Multimedia projects (e.g., Scalar)
  • Data Visualizations

We look forward to receiving your ideas, experiences, and expertise for the Curatorial Connections Column.

The Data Curation Network

The Journal of eScience Librarianship