Measuring and Improving the Efficacy of Curation Activities in Data Archives

Abstract

It is well known that digital curation is critically important to ensuring the preservation, accessibility, and usability of digital collections. However, we know relatively little about the impact of specific curatorial actions (that is, discrete steps taken to improve a digital object) on the usability or accessibility of digital collections and datasets. The IMLS- and NSF-funded Measuring Impacts of Curatorial Actions (MICA) project is developing curatorial metrics using the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) data archive to evaluate the impact and efficacy of specific data curation processes. Curatorial metrics are statistical measures similar to bibliometrics but used to assess the impact of curatorial work on the use of collections. Using curation logs and other records, we develop and analyze a range of metrics from the last five years of data curation at the ICPSR. ICPSR is a highly impactful social science data repository, and provides us with a unique site and dataset for this study.

We are additionally conducting interviews with ICPSR stakeholders to better understand how they see the impact of their work, and their data collections. Stakeholders include archive managers, data curators, data reusers, and more. These interviews provide insights into how we should prioritize curatorial actions to achieve impact, and return on our investment in data curation.

In this poster we will present preliminary work identifying curatorial activities from interviews with ICPSR stakeholders and curator work tickets and discuss next steps in our research to develop metrics.