Carole L. Palmer, a professor of library and information science, says that data curation - the active and ongoing management of data through their lifecycle of interest to science - is now understood to be an important part of supporting and advancing research.
"There's a lot of recognition now of the value of data as assets to institutions and to the scientific enterprise, more generally," Palmer said. "Saving only the publications that report the results of research simply isn't enough anymore. Researchers also need access to data that can be integrated and re-used in new ways. This is especially important in data-intensive science, where the power of discovery lies in applying computational approaches to large, aggregated data sets."
[Can you say an increasingly IMPORTANT role for info professionals?]
Palmer, who also is the director of the Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship at Illinois, said that researchers need to start thinking about data-management requirements from the very beginning of their projects, and to think in terms of a data set's lifecycle.
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The biggest difficulties in collecting, curating and managing large amounts of data over the long term have to do with cost and labor.
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"Digital content, including digital data, is much more vulnerable than the print or analog formats we had before," Palmer said.
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To those who would say publish it on a Web page and let Google cache the page for posterity, Palmer argues that businesses don't have the orientation necessary for curating and preserving information for the really long term - say, for hundreds of years.
Research libraries, on the other hand, have this mission and always have been committed to this.
"The common perception is that keeping information online keeps it alive," Palmer said. "But someone, somewhere, has to maintain it and make it accessible and usable for researchers. It's not wise to rely on publishers or other commercial entities that have never really been in the business of preservation. Businesses can go out of business, and they're driven by commercial interests."
"So just assuming that if it's online, it's accessible - well, it's accessible until it's not."
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