Geospatial Data Curation at the University of Idaho

Abstract

The management and curation of digital geospatial data has become a central concern for many academic libraries. Geospatial data is a complex type of data critical to many different disciplines, and its use has become more expansive in the past decade. The University of Idaho Library maintains a geospatial data repository called the Interactive Numeric and Spatial Information Data Engine for Idaho (INSIDE Idaho) to support the land-grant research and outreach mission of the university. INSIDE Idaho-enabled research projects show that curating geospatial data requires a flexible, continuing partnership with researchers. First, changing access formats and data publishing protocols lead to cases in which the data are frequently disseminated in new ways. Second, researchers’ changing expectations about data reuse, as well as their own practices, require a repository to be both responsive and communicative. A strong curatorial process involves enabling new research and applications to be developed from the repository's data collections. Third, the experience with INSIDE Idaho suggests building a culture of data management awareness at an institution can be as valuable a use of a library's time as working to curate the data; that is, developing the local culture improves the efficiency of the curation process, most notably in the case of metadata. The experiences described in this article support the idea that academic libraries must develop infrastructure, policies, skills, and relationships to manage and curate research data successfully.