Providing expertise on data management

What's the need?

• Many civic organizations produce data and need support with managing and versioning files, standardizing data-related practices, addressing data privacy, determining retention of data, sharing data appropriately, and more.

• Many data publishers (such as managers of open data portals) need support with metadata and vocabularies, format standards, technical infrastructure strategies, and more.

• Many data users need strategies for personal data practices, including naming, labeling, storage, backups, deleting, and more.

Why the library?

• Library workers have the skills to provide data management and data hosting services to organizations that may not otherwise have internal capacity to treat their data as an asset.

What you can do:

• Consult with data producers, publishers, and users on:

  • Metadata used for datasets and data portals

  • Technical infrastructure for repositories

  • Data management planning

  • Protecting privacy when data sharing

Inspiration:

• Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Library System and Western PA Regional Data Center metadata collaboration

Resources you can use:

• Project Open Data. Project Open Data Metadata Schema

• World Wide Web Consortium. Data Catalog Vocabulary (DCAT)

• World-Wide Web Consortium. Data on the Web Best Practices

• Force11: The FAIR Data Principles

• Green, B., Cunningham, G., Ekblaw, A., & Kominers, P. (2017). Open Data Privacy. SSRN Electronic Journal

• Data SF 4 Steps to Manage Privacy and De-Identification for your Open Data Program

• Borgman, Christine (2018). Open Data, Grey Data, and Stewardship: Universities at the Privacy Frontier. Berkeley Technology Law Journal, 33:2, 365-412