Eliciting Faculty Requirements for Research Data Repositories

Abstract

In a two-year project sponsored by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, investigators from Purdue University and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign are addressing the question, "Which researchers are willing to share data, when, with whom, and under what conditions?" In-depth interviews and surveys have been conducted with 19 faculty researchers in 12 different disciplines about their scientific workflow and range of research outputs (e.g., raw data through published forms) to identify needs for discovery, access, use, and repurposing of their data. As the study enters its second year, we are ready to share preliminary findings that relate the needs for data curation that were expressed by the subjects to possible functional requirements that a data repository system can provide to meet those needs. These early results can provide immediate and valuable insights to developers and implementers of data repositories as well as practitioners who are developing and managing data collections.