Digital Data Management, Curation, and Archiving

UNM's Institutional Repository


There are a number of possible places to archive your data, your personal computer NOT being one of them. The University of New Mexico Libraries support an institutional data repository. There are also domain specific repositories, for instance GenBank for molecular sequences, which might be more appropriate for your data. Also, many journals are starting to archive data that support the manuscripts they publish. Unfortunately there are a dizzying number of data repositories out there. You can browse potential repositories for places to deposit or access data at re3data.org, an online list of many repositories.

As always, if you are in doubt, feel free to consult your data librarian for advice. Below we have some boilerplate text if you wish to deposit your data in the UNM Repository:

Data will be archived for a minimum of 10 years at the UNM Libraries’ Digital Repository after the grant ends. After this time, the data will be appraised per established collection and archival management policies for transfer to an external repository, longer-term archiving, or alternative disposition. The UNM Digital Repository is an Open Archives Initiative (OAI) compliant repository, which enables Dublin Core metadata and dataset objects to be shared and harvested by other archival and discovery systems through the OAI-PMH protocol.

The UNM Digital Repository is maintained by the UNM Libraries. Archive staff will also provide daily file integrity and format verification and will create and maintain technical and administrative metadata using the widely adopted Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard and Preservation Metadata Implementation Strategies metadata standards. These additional metadata include digital file signatures and checksums for bitwise integrity validation and chain of custody documentation. Primary responsibility for curating and preparing the data for archiving will rest with the Libraries’ Data Curation Librarian.

While the UNM Digital Repository can  be used to share and archive data sets of any size, if you anticipate publishing more than 100GB of data in please be sure to contact Research Data Service (rds@unm.edu) for additional support.