Data Curation Education in Research Centers Poster

The volume of scientific data is growing exponentially across all scientific disciplines. Competent information professionals are needed to sort, catalog, store, and retrieve this data for future research and education requirements. In response to this need, the goal of the Data Curation Education in Research Centers (DCERC) project is to develop curriculum to educate information science students in the critical field of scientific data curation. Three masters degree students at University of Tennessee (UT) and three doctoral students at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign are completing year one of the program. Each brings to the field of data curation skills obtained from prior work in diverse scientific and engineering professions. In the summers of 2012 and 2013, the masters students will travel to the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, to work alongside scientists and researchers and to experience the demands of data curation at the source of data creation. The NCAR experience will allow students to assimilate the skills learned from the Fundamentals in Data Curation course, which will be completed in Spring 2012. This poster session will display and demonstrate the goals, student achievements, and overall program performance by providing examples of the specific skill sets the students are obtaining, projects they are completing, and expected future milestones.