NYU Libraries and Data Services are excited to announce that we have joined the Data Curation Network (DCN) and become one of ten partner institutions who distribute the work of curating research data and making it available for discovery and re-use (see the DCN blog post for the announcement). As data curators and participants in this network, we prepare and enrich research data to make them findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable in ways that expand beyond what a single library or institution might be able to do on its own.

So far, the network has curated over 30 datasets that pertain to a range of disciplines, and these datasets have been documented and deposited in repositories across the United States. A recent impact statement by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) notes the educative role the DCN holds in promoting well-documented and curated data practices in many library settings. The DCN has released a range of activities, best practices, and guides to help institutions provide data access.

Although NYU’s involvement with the Data Curation Network is represented by Katie Wissel, Data Services Librarian, and Andrew Battista, Librarian for Geospatial Information Systems, we note that the Libraries has several people who have engaged with the project’s work, including Vicky Steeves, Librarian for Research Data Management, Nick Wolf, Research Data Management Librarian, Genevieve Milliken, who is co-authoring one of the DCN Primers, and Kevin Read and Nicole Contaxis of the NYU Medical Library and data catalog, who have attended DCN training events and also participate in the Data Catalog Collaboration Project (DCCP) for fostering discovery and use of biomedical data.

What does this mean for the NYU research community?

Now that NYU Libraries has joined the DCN, we invest a portion of our time to curate datasets that researchers at other institutions submit. However, it also means that we can benefit from the larger network of knowledge held by the other 25-plus curators.

• Anyone in the NYU community who is interested in contributing research data (to any repository) can reach out to us and receive assistance curating data.
• Data Services will begin working to apply data curation principles as we acquire licensed data and make it available to the NYU community.

We are excited about our partnership and look forward to a growing organization of curated data and shared labor.