The Data Curation Network held six focus groups in the fall of 2016 and asked 91 researchers from a wide variety of disciplines: how would you rate the “importance” of a variety of key data curation activities. Our preliminary results for the importance ranking of 35 data curation activities are presented in the table below. For a list of all the definitions of the data curation activities, along with a brief summary of our methodology and attendance numbers by discipline, see our preliminary results posted in the publications section.
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Key finding: The five most important data curation activities indicated in our focus groups were creating documentation for data, preserving the “chain of custody” of a dataset, securely storing data, providing quality assurance for data, and minting a persistent identifier for a data set. |
Figure 1: Results of the Average Ranking of Importance for Activities that were ranked by the Data Curation Network Focus Groups (5= highest importance, 1 = not important)
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“Most Important” Average Ranking of 4.0 – 4.9 |
“Important” Average Ranking of 3.0 – 3.9 |
“Less Important” Average Ranking of 2.0 – 2.9 |
“Not Important” Average Ranking of 1.0 – 1.9 |
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Documentation, Chain of custody, Secure Storage, Quality Assurance Persistent Identifier, Discovery Services, Curation Log, Technology Monitoring and Refresh, Software Registry, Data Visualization, File Audit, Metadata |
Versioning, Contextualize, Code review, File Format Transformations, Interoperability, Data Cleaning, Embargo, Rights Management, Risk Management, Use Analytics, Peer-review, Terms of Use, Data Citation, File validation, Migration, File Inventory or Manifest, Metadata Brokerage, Deidentification, Repository Certification |
Emulation, Restricted Access, Correspondence, Full-Text Indexing |