Research Data Management

Data Curation

What is data curation?

Data curation is the process of making data findable and usable to others, now and in the future. In 2016, the FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship were developed to provide guidance for data producers and publishers to enhance the reusability of scientific data. The principles emphasize machine-actionability (i.e., the capacity of computational systems to find, access, interoperate, and reuse data with none or minimal human intervention.

Visit GoFAIR to learn more about the FAIR principles.

Data Curation Network

Data Curation Training Resources

The Data Curation Centre has developed a standardized set of steps and checklists for data curation. See the CURATE(D) steps, checklists and primers below. Their primers can also be found on github.

Data Curation Network Resources
Data curation steps and checklists.
Data Curation Network Primers
Data curation primers for: Acrobat PDF, ATLAS.ti, Confocal Microscopy Image , Geodatabase , GeoJSON , Jupyter Notebooks, Microsoft Access, Microsoft Excel , netCDF, SPSS, STL, R, Tableau, WordPress.com and more.

Other Resources

Data Rescue & Curation Best Practice Guide
The aim of the guide is to provide an accessible and hands-on approach to handling data rescue and digital curation of at-risk data for use in secondary research. It provides a set of examples and workflows for addressing common challenges with social science survey data that can be applied to other social and behavioural research data.
Data Stewardship: An introduction to data standards and metadata (Statistics Canada)
Whether you’re gathering new data or using existing data, applying data standards will make your life easier. And documenting your data in metadata will ensure that others will be able to find it, understand it, and use it.

In this video, you'll learn what we can do to data itself, to make it easier to work with. That's the role of data standards. And you'll learn what extra information we can provide to make data easier to use. That's the role of metadata.