University of Michigan

The University of Michigan’s School of Information, along with its partners the Inter-university Consortium for Social and Political Research, the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology, and the nonprofit Alexandria Archive Institute, will study how contextual information about data sets can best be created and preserved along with the data, to promote greater potential for reuse and repurposing of the data. This investigation will focus on research data produced and used by three disciplines: quantitative social sciences, archaeology, and zoology. The intended audiences of this project are researchers who use secondary data and the digital curators, digital repository managers, data center staff, and others who collect, manage, and store digital information. Knowledge gained from the study will help guide current and future international practices for curating and preserving digital research data.