What Does Your Data Curation Look Like? Better Collaboration Between Research Tool Providers and Curators
Creators: name: Plankytė, Vaida
name: Macniel, Rory
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2025
Subjects: IDCC25
Lightning Talks
Curation infrastructure: Tools, systems and services that are in development
Curation infrastructure: Evaluations of existing tools and principles in data curation
esearch tools, research data lifecycle, user research, curation workflows, collaboration
Research tools
Research data lifecycle
User research
Curation workflows
Collaboration

description: We wish to present the previous and ongoing work by our upcoming RDA Interest Group, centered around the intersection between research tools and data curation workflows.

We have held a Birds of a Feather session entitled “Research Tool Usage in Data Curation Workflows: Responsibilities & Collaboration” at the RDA Virtual Plenary 22, where we highlighted that “data curation” is interpreted and approached in multiple different ways across institutions, as an activity and as a role, as well as having different ways of existing within an institutional RDM frame: as a separate department, part of the Library services, or embedded. This results in each institution having both subtly and significantly different requirements when it comes to what, how, and which research tools can best assist with the kind of data curation they perform.

Presentations by RDM managers and research tool providers reflected on how collaboration between institutional RDM and research tools can be streamlined through an explicit definition of what data curation involves for that institution. The development of a shared language between parties and clarification of the tasks involved that require support then enables greater understanding of how each party’s role in the successful adoption and usage of tools for data curation.

Looking forward, the RDA Working Group “Mapping the landscape of digital research tools” has carried out a comprehensive review of existing research data lifecycle models, and is publishing their harmonized MaLDReTH model in August 2024. Crucially, their model has also mapped existing research tools, based on their feature set, onto each stage of the MaLDReTH model.

At IDCC25, we would like to summarize the learnings from the Birds of a Feather session, as well as present the outcome of reviewing the MaLDReTH model in the context of our interest group: we aim to develop guidelines and facilitate a shared language between research data managers and research tool providers around data curation, and by grounding ourselves in a universal lifecycle model, we hope to formalize institutional RDM approaches and their resulting research tool needs and requirements. We aim for this work to help inform the research tool selection and adoption process through a well articulated statement of purpose.

We believe our work addresses concrete practical issues that cause points of friction in institutional research infrastructures, which are constantly increasing in complexity and becoming essential to all research disciplines, requiring great understanding of researcher and curator needs. We trust IDCC25 would be the ideal space to present our findings, and discuss the intersection between research tools and institutional data curation in terms of communication, onboarding, adoption, and workflows.