The closing theme of the day for Love Your Data Week 2017 is "Rescuing Unloved Data." While digital data are by no means assumed to be longer lived or easier to preserve than analog data, there are benefits to the digitization of legacy and heritage data with an eye toward their preservation and archiving. Similarly, the evaluation and migration of older, born digital datasets is a time and resource intensive activity requiring careful assessment and appraisal in order to maximize the benefit of digital curation to science and society.
Lofty words for a Friday morning, but consider the value and potential impact of ongoing efforts to rescue and curate historical climate and oceanographic data including:
Some time has passed since this project was completed, but here in the University Libraries we were fortunate to be involved in the migration of digital data in legacy formats when we curated the New Mexico and Colorado Spanish Survey dataset. These data constitute enthographic and linguistic information captured by Garland Bills and Neddy Vigil during their research for The Spanish Language of New Mexico and Southern Colorado: A Linguistic Atlas. Curating the data involved inventorying, organizing, migrating file formats, and enhancing documentation - all steps in a process nicely summarized on the LYD17 website (https://loveyourdata.wordpress.com/lydw-2017/friday-2017/). The results speak to the long term value of the data, with a de-identified, publicly available version available online at http://hdl.handle.net/1928/20424. We hope the results also speak to and justify the cost and effort of legacy data curation and preservation.
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