Excerpt:
With the world awash in information, curating all the scientifically relevant bits and bytes is an important task, especially given digital data’s increasing importance as the raw materials for new scientific discoveries, an expert in information science at the University of Illinois says. Carole L. Palmer, a professor of library and information science, says that data curation — the active and ongoing management of data through their lifecycle of interest to science — is now understood to be an important part of supporting and advancing research….The Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship at Illinois will receive about $2.9 million as a partner on the Data Conservancy project, a $20 million initiative led by Sayeed Choudhury at the Johns Hopkins University Sheridan Libraries. The five-year award, one of the first two in the National Science Foundation’s DataNet program, will fund developing infrastructure for the management of the ever-increasing amounts of digital research data.
Ref: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “Deluge of scientific data needs to be curated for long-term use.” ScienceDaily, 25 Feb. 2010. Web. 29 Aug. 2011.
Posted by John Rachlin 
