Giving Datasets Context: a Comparison Study of Institutional Repositories that Apply Varying Degrees of Curation

Abstract

This research study compared four academic libraries’ approaches to curating the metadata of dataset submissions in their institutional repositories and classified them in one of four categories: no curation, pre-ingest curation, selective curation, and post-ingest curation. The goal is to understand the impact that curation may have on the quality of user-submitted metadata. The findings were 1) the metadata elements varied greatly between institutions, 2) repositories with more options for authors to contribute metadata did not result in more metadata contributed, 3) pre- or post-ingest curation process could have a measurable impact on the metadata but are difficult to separate from other factors, and 4) datasets submitted to a repository with pre- or post-ingest curation more often included documentation.