Elevating Community-Led Digital Curation Resources to an Institutional Level

This presentation explores a case study from Digital Curation in the context of a research organisation. We present the ongoing work on creating and maintaining a community-led university resource with guidelines and best practices. Digital Curation is an important part of research and Open Science as it ensures long term preservation of research data, replicability of research results, and trustworthiness of research in general. Many open science resources are community-led, creating a sense of shared ownership and engagement. Inspired by community-led resources like the Turing Way, the VU Amsterdam Research Support team started working on a collaborative handbook that is community-driven and -maintained. This enables VU Amsterdam colleagues to co-create guidelines that are relevant and useful to them. The handbook is meant to complement official university webpages which are managed by the university-wide communications department. Such institutional pages are challenging to update according to the user needs - they risk to become outdated and disconnected from the daily life of researchers and their needs. The field of research data management is dynamic and changes rapidly. Finding up-to-date and trustworthy information that is immediately relevant for one’s work is critical to successfully fulfilling one’s role. There is an abundance of resources that focus primarily on the national and international level. As a result, current resources are not always applicable to the local context. The user experience research conducted for VU Amsterdam in 2020 and 2023 highlighted that official institutional pages mostly fail to guide the users (in our case researchers) to the information they need. They often turn out to be outdated, fragmented and not interlinked in a proper way. Working on a community-led resource offers flexibility and makes it easy for the community to update resources, signal problems, and suggest improvements. At the same time, we observe that the community approach does not fit well into the university way of working. Various departments struggle to endorse it without the certainty of what they are endorsing. Yet, community-led means that the outcome is not predetermined. In our efforts to create community resources and having them accepted as institutional resources, we encounter an institution that struggles to accept working openly, despite all our efforts to change the culture at our institutions. It highlights how the wider culture change towards working openly should not overlook the departments that are not present within the open science movement. We want to share some of our success and highlight the challenges we encounter and look forward to hearing from the audience about similar resources they’ve been developing.