A Destination for DRUM Dataset Deposits: Creating the UMD Data Collection

Abstract

As publisher policies and funding agencies increasingly require or encourage research data be made open for wider access and review, improving data collection and curation practices in institutional repositories has become commensurately necessary to support the needs of researchers and the goals of open scholarship. Since the Digital Repository at the University of Maryland’s (DRUM) launch in 2005, it has been utilized in archiving research datasets produced by UMD researchers. However, the repository’s general self-submission workflow lacks mechanisms to consistently collect essential identifying metadata as well as other metadata necessary for best practices in research data archiving. The UMD Data Collection was created in the summer of 2021 to address such issues. This poster outlines the design and implementation of the collection and its customized workflow to better enable future curation, management, and discovery of research datasets archived in UMD's institutional repository.