WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – Purdue University Libraries is leading the development of a new, online resource that will help people locate research data on the Internet.<\/p>\n
The project is called Databib and will engage a community of librarians from around the world to collaborate in creating an online bibliography of data repositories that can be used by researchers, students, funding agencies, and other librarians to find appropriate places to access and share research data. The Institute of Museum and Library Services, a federal research agency, awarded a grant to support the project.<\/p>\n
“Funding agencies such as the National Science Foundation recognize the importance of sharing research data and have begun requiring that all grant proposals be submitted with plans for managing and sharing data,” said Michael Witt, the project’s principal investigator and an assistant professor of library science at Purdue.<\/p>\n
“Databib will be a tool that helps researchers who produce data determine where to submit and publish their datasets, too.”<\/p>\n
The project also will serve as a testbed for presenting, linking and integrating information about data repositories in new ways. Records from Databib will be integrated into social book marking services and made available for libraries to import into their catalogs. They will also be exposed as Linked Data, which is an implementation of the Semantic Web that seeks to create a “web of data.”<\/p>\n
Purdue is collaborating with Penn State University on the nine-month project, which is scheduled to be completed in May 2012. More information can be found on the project’s website, http:\/\/databib.lib.purdue.edu<\/a><\/p>\n Source: <\/strong>Michael Witt, 765-494-8703, mwitt@purdue.edu<\/a><\/p>\n