CIRSS

Final Report Published for Long-running IMLS Data Curation Education Program Grant

"Centuries of Knowledge: Graduate School of Library and Information Science Data Curation Education Program" (DCEP), one of our most successful and long-running grant projects, concluded this December, and the final report is now available through IDEALS: http://hdl.handle.net/2142/30845.

DCEP was funded by the Institute for Museum and Library Services (RE-05-05-0036) and was designed to increase educational and research capacity in data curation at GSLIS. In the first year of the project we developed the Data Curation Education Program, a specialization within our Master of Science degree program.  As of May 2012, 54 students have completed the specialization, and our alumni have gone on to secure positions in a variety of institutions, including research centers, academic libraries, government agencies, and corporate industry.

In developing the curriculum for the specialization, we also created two new courses: Foundations of Data Curation, a survey course on the emerging field, and Digital Preservation. Along with Systems Analysis and Management, they constitute the core required courses in the specialization, and they are consistently enrolled at capacity each semester.

In 2008, we conducted the first annual Summer Institute on Data Curation for practicing information professionals, facilitating the development of a community of practice across U.S. and Canadian academic and research organizations. Our outreach and service activities have led to a range of new partnerships that have resulted in student fieldwork opportunities and new collaborative research and education activities at CIRSS, resulting in four successful grant proposals.