University of Arizona College of Information Science

The College of Information Science of the University of Arizona will develop a plan to support the curation of data and metadata related to physical samples such as rocks, fossils, biological specimens, and water samples, etc. The project will develop guidelines, training modules, and data management software to enable this work. It will conduct multiple needs analysis activities, including surveys of research data services librarians and sample user/curators, follow-up focus groups, and hands-on curation case studies with project partners. The project seeks to build community through multiple workshops with data curation librarians, sample users, and infrastructure developers. The effort will assess how data curation librarians can advance open science and data reuse for in natural science fields that rely on physical samples.