Researchers from the U-M School of Information (UMSI) and the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) have received grants totaling nearly $1 million from the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the National Science Foundation to study the impact of data curation on reuse.
Funding agencies increasingly are requiring researchers to share and archive their data, which enables other researchers to pursue new research questions while also providing the transparency necessary for evaluation, replication and verification of results. But not all data needs to be kept forever.
“The care and feeding of data long term is expensive, so we want to make sure that we make good investments,” explains Libby Hemphill, UMSI associate professor and one of the principal investigators on the study. “But we don’t know how much it really costs to prepare data for reuse. That’s the question that initially sparked this research proposal.”
