Sustainable Data Management for the Solar Decathlon

Abstract

University of Maryland Libraries are taking the lead in archiving and curating data sets for the UMD Solar Decathlon Team Maryland (2002, 2005, 2007, 2011, 2017 and Solar Decathlon Europe 2019). A 2017 report from the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL), Insights on Technology Innovation - A Review of the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon Competition Entries 2002-2015 (Simon, 2017) found that over time, the technologies developed, demonstrated and perfected for the competition series have become more commonplace in industry. While more than 500 books, thesis, reports and articles have been written about the individual competitions in its sixteen years of existence, to date there has been no systematic archiving of the research, scholarly and creative work created by these competitions. Patricia Cossard and David Durden (DSS) are working with the U.S. Department of Energy (all competition deliverables/documents have recently been transferred from NREL to DOE with no developed maintenance plan), the OECD's International Energy Agency (the Solar Decathlon Knowledge Base (SDKB), and Team Maryland to develop a data management standard and best practices for international dissemination to all teams and agencies, past, present and future.