Preserving and making available curated data is central to the National Science Foundations directives.  We are working to meet the needs of researchers in archiving, preserving, and serving data out to researchers.  Please see the NSF Guildines for details.

 

Data and metadata standards

Following along these guidlines:

the MRL aims to provide a format for researchers to archive and curate analyzed data and its metadata.  Many journals provide for the submission of supporting and secondary data which meet the NSF's goals and the MRL attempts not to duplicate those submissions.  However with open access requirements for both peer reviewed articles and data in support of such articles, UCSB's MRSEC strives to give researchers the resources they need to be compliant with NSF policy.

 

While curating and archiving all raw data would be unsustainable, data in support of publications will be archived in the UCSB DASH instance provided by the library ( https://www.library.ucsb.edu/data-curation/repository ).

UCSB DASH is a repository service and curation environment for storage and preservation of data and is provided by the California Digital Library. DASH is used to manage, archive, and share content. It provides significant features for a digital object:

• long term storage

• access via persistent URLs

• tools for long term management

• easy-to-use interface for deposits and udpates

DASH uses the Dublin Core format for metadata standards and researchers will be asked to generally include descriptions of instruments used, analytic techniques, dates, data description, DOI links and other metadata which DASH will abstract in to XML.  Upon paper submission researchers create a container of primary data tagged with the appropriate metadata in the DASH repository.  For training and best-practices please contact the computational facility manager or the library at datacuration [at] library [dot] ucsb [dot] edu .