Towards Narrowing the Curation Gap—Theoretical Considerations and Lessons Learned from Decades of Practice

Abstract

Abstract:Research as a digital enterprise has created new, often poorly addressed challenges for the management and curation of research to ensure continuity, transparency, and accountability. There is a common misunderstanding that curation can be considered at a later point in the research cycle or delegated or that it is too burdensome or too expensive due to a lack of efficient tools. This creates a curation gap between research practice and curation needs. We argue that this gap can be narrowed if curators provide attractive support that befits research needs and if researchers consistently manage their work according to generic concepts consistently from the beginning. A rather uniquely long-term case study demonstrates how such concepts have helped to pragmatically implement a research practice intentionally using only minimalist tools for sustained, self-contained archiving since 1989. The paper sketches the concepts underlying three core research activities. (i) handling of research data, (ii) reference management as part of scholarly publishing, and (iii) advancing theories through modelling and simulation. These concepts represent a universally transferable best research practice, while technical details are obviously prone to continuous change. We hope it stimulates researchers to manage research similarly and that curators gain a better understanding of the curation challenges research practice actually faces.

Research 2.0 and Research Data Services in academic and research libraries: priority issues

“…The need for management and curation of research to ensure continuity, transparency and accountability has created new challenges that are often poorly addressed by the libraries (Sesartić et al, 2016). Hence, it is not by accident that activities, related to research data have been identified as top trends of academic library work not only in 2012 and 2014, but also in 2016, focussing in the latter case on professional development for librarians, providing Research Data Services (RDSs) (ACRL, 2012(ACRL, , 2014(ACRL, , 2016.…”

Research Data Services at ETH-Bibliothek

“…Firstly, one of his post-docs involved in the operation could be hired to work with ETH Library's Digital Curation Team, and secondly, the discussion of the principles underlying this research group's archive recently led to a publication highlighting the general concepts behind their approach which had proven useful for almost three decades of research practice (Sesartić et al, 2016).…”