Building a Research Data Catalog

Academic institutions are finding that they need to do a better job of managing the data generated by campus researchers. While having a data repository is the aspirational solution, our campus is not yet at a place where we can justify it. In the interim, we have created a research dataset catalog to assist with making research created on our campus more visible. A dataset catalog is a tangible first step toward better management of research datasets through metadata-only records that link out to datasets hosted externally. For this project, we chose to leverage our existing Digital Commons repository. Topics for discussion include the situation on our campus, groundwork we conducted, harvesting of records in third-party repositories via APIs, metadata evaluation and normalization, and raising awareness to make the catalog a sustainable resource.