Ken Mitchell
Manager, Systems & Digital Services, University Library
King Abdullah University of Science and Technology
Mohamed Baessa
Digital Repository Specialist, University Library
King Abdullah University of Science and Technology
Molly Tamarkin
Director, University Library
King Abdullah University of Science and Technology
What should a digital collection of research data look like? Should we treat it as a “born-digital” collection and apply library special collections treatments to it? Should we view it solely as part of the research process life-cycle and focus on contextualized and accessible storage techniques? Or are there other solutions that can combine these approaches? Can we incorporate the benefits of both research data management practices and special collections traditions, focusing on utility, reuse, preservation and meaningful context, while avoiding pitfalls of obscurity, excesses of branding, boutique-style presentations, or simply redundancy? Using the example of a research project on Saudi desert microbes and the challenges we’ve faced in contextualizing, organizing and framing the data, we will present how a young Saudi Arabian science and technology university has been tackling these issues as it works to develop a digital collections and data curation program that can serve its present and future researchers, and the university, as well as advance scholarship within the global scientific community.