Library Service Preserves and Publishes Research Data

Finding a place to park data where it is available to others can be an afterthought for many researchers.

Increasingly, however, funding agencies as well as publishers are requiring that the data supporting published findings be shared with the public.

In the spring of this year, the UC Merced Library helped Professor Roger Bales and the data manager on his team, Xiande Meng, archive data from the Southern Sierra Critical Zone Observatory.

The research team had seven years’ worth of data that needed a permanent home, and sustainability of the NSF CZOs’ data archiving program was not secure. Librarian Emily Lin helped create metadata and readme files to describe the data and deposit the data in the Merritt preservation repository at the California Digital Library.

The first dataset was harvested in March and made available to the public through UC’s Dash data sharing service. The dataset has a citable DOI (digital object identifier), and research team members also registered for ORCIDs (unique researcher identifiers) as a result. The team is continuing to prepare other datasets for deposit and public access.

The Dash data service allows UC Merced researchers to easily deposit their own data within 2 GB files, 10 GB per dataset limit.

The service was updated in November to support geospatial metadata, funder metadata, and ORCID integration. Researchers with larger datasets to deposit or questions about data archiving can contact the Library for assistance at curation@ucmerced.edu.