Sayeed Choudhury on establishing a university data management program

Abstract

In conjunction with the International Open Access Week (October Oct. 18-24th), the BC Research Libraries Group invited G. Sayeed Choudhury, Associate Dean for Library Digital Programs and Hodson Director of the Digital Research and Curation Center at the Sheridan Libraries of Johns Hopkins University, to speak on the Case for Open Data and eScience - Establishing a University Data Management Program at Johns Hopkins.

Sayeed Choudhury discussed John Hopkins University (JHU) work developing a university data management program and a service model to support data curation as part of an evolving cyberinfrastructure featuring open, modular components in support of JHU faculty associated with community-wide eScience projects. In addition to developing a technological framework for data conservancy at JHU, they are also developing new roles and relationships between the library and the academic community, most notably through the development of "data scientists" or "data humanists." Within these developments, Choudhury concluded that institutional repositories is the first step in a longer journey towards data conservation and that for institutional efforts to be successful, they must be integrated into a larger landscape of repositories that serve a distributed and diverse academic community.