PROGRAM: 4-9
Title:
CROSS-CAMPUS COLLABORATIONS ENABLE MORE TRUST-WORTHY DATA SHARING AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOISAbstract:
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign established a campus program, called the Research Data Service
(RDS), to support researchers in their efforts to manage and steward research data created at the University. The
RDS at Illinois was conceived of as a program that would involve many units on campus, including
administrative units such as the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, as well as service units such as
Information Technology (IT) and the Library. Cross-campus collaborations between the RDS and these units
have proven to be time-intensive but imperative to the development of support for research data on our campus.
After a year of development, the RDS launched a public data repository, called the Illinois Data Bank
(databank.illinois.edu; Fallaw, et al. 2016), in 2016. The Illinois Data Bank serves as a data publishing platform
that centralizes, preserves, and provides persistent and reliable access to Illinois research. While our researchers
use domain repositories wherever possible, the Illinois Data Bank is particularly important for Illinois research
data that does not have an associated domain repository, whether it be due to topic, format, or size.
As the Illinois Data Bank was developed, and as we continue to refine the service, our cross-campus
collaborations participated in several ways. Examples include policy development, user testing, and provision of
storage infrastructure—all of which have enabled a more robust, resilient, and effective service. This
presentation will cover how these different collaborations at Illinois contributed to our data infrastructure to
create a more trust-worthy data repository. The Core Trustworthy Data Repositories Requirements (Edmunds, et
al. 2016) will be used to reflect on where collaborations at Illinois have made the biggest impact and also
highlight areas for future development and collaboration.
References:
Fallaw, C. Dunham, E.M., Wickes, E., Strong, D., Stein, A., Zhang, Q., Rimkus, K., Ingram, B., & Imker, H.J.
(2016) Overly Honest Data Repository Development. Code4Lib Journal 34
http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/11980
Edmunds, R., L'Hours, H., Rickards, L., Trilsbeek, P. & Vardigan, M. (2016) Core Trustworthy Data
Repositories Requirements. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.168411