The Data Conservancy Instance: Infrastructure and Organizational Services for Research Data Curation

The Data Conservancy Instance: Infrastructure and Organizational Services for Research Data Curation. Matthew S. Mayernik, et al. D-Lib Magazine. September/October 2012.
Digital research data can only be managed and preserved over time through a sustained institutional commitment. Digital research data, if curated and made broadly available, promise to enable researchers to ask new kinds of questions and use new kinds of analytical methods in the study of critical scientific and societal issues. 

The Data Conservancy, a community organized around data curation research, technology development, and community building, is driven by a common theme: the need for institutional solutions to digital research data collection, curation and preservation challenges.
The four main activities of the Data Conservancy are:

1. A focused research program to examine research practices across multiple disciplines in order to understand the data curation tools and services needed to support interdisciplinary research
2. An infrastructure development program for data management and curation services
3. Data curation educational and professional development programs 
4. Development of sustainability models for long term data curation.

Data curation solutions for research institutions must address both technical and organizational challenges. These include context, hardware and software infrastructure, services, and sustainable strategy.

The features needed include a preservation-ready system, customizable user interfaces, flexible data model, ingest and search interface,  and data examination processes.