Curation of Scientific Data at Risk of Loss: Data Rescue and Dissemination

Data rescue offers an opportunity for digital repositories, including institutional repositories, data archives, and scientific data centers, to provide access to potentially valuable scientific data that is at risk of being lost. Rescue may be valuable not only to restore access to data of past scientific interest, such as environmental observations or social surveys, but also to recover historic information about the state of knowledge and science at the time the data was collected or assembled. Scientific data may need to be rescued at any stage along the data life cycle, and the extent of data curation that was completed prior to a data rescue effort may vary, depending on the circumstances that led to the need for data rescue. The level of effort required to complete a data rescue depends largely on the condition of the data being rescued, the availability and quality of data documentation and provenance information, and the accessibility of the data producers. In extreme cases, data organization and documentation are poor, and those knowledgeable about how the data was collected or developed are no longer available. In some cases, collections of data sets may need to be rescued from an existing archive that is no longer sustainable. In short, scientific data may be at risk of loss for a variety of reasons, and a data rescue effort can present new challenges for data curation and dissemination operations.

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