Now Available
Research Data Curation: A Framework for an Institution-Wide Services Approach

An EDUCAUSE Working Group Paper
https://library.educause.edu/resources/2018/5/research-data-curation-a-framework-for-an-institution-wide-services-approach

Universities and colleges should consider an institution-wide approach to developing services for managing and curating research data. This paper identifies service areas and includes a framework for institutions to document current research data curation services and responsibilities. This timely, informative paper can also be found in the EDUCAUSE library and on the EDUCAUSE Working Groups website: www.educause.edu/ecar/ecar-working-groups

The publication is available to all EDUCAUSE members for one year, following which it made public. A full list of member institutions can be found at: https://members.educause.edu/. For more information about this paper and EDUCAUSE Working Groups, contact WG@educause.edu

The second “Technology Matters in Archives” column has been published, “Email: An Appraisal Approach.”

“For nearly a half-century, we in the archives, records, and information management professions have either taught our institutions and organizations, or been taught, that a record is a record, no matter the media or manner in which it is created. It is the informational value contained within the item that determines whether it is a record. If it is a record, we then need to identify the temporal value of that information to determine its lifecycle, that is how long it should be maintained and its final disposition, either destruction or accessioning to an archive. However, there still is significant pushback from our institutions’ desires to treat electronic or born digital records as something different from those that are paper-based and/or analog-born, and subsequently want to monolithically manage electronic/digital records’ lifecycles as a single record type…This problem exists throughout our organizations from our enterprise systems that manage human resources and financial data, to our shared drives, to the darkest and dankest quagmire of all, our email systems. Had Dante Alighieri been a records or information management professional in the twenty-first century, he may have assigned one level of his hell solely to email.” Join me as I discuss potential solutions for applying sound records management to email.

Visit my “Scholarship” page for additional links to publications and presentations.