Research data and metadata curation as institutional issues

Research data curation initiatives must support heterogeneous kinds of projects, data, and metadata. This article examines variability in data and metadata practices using "institutions" as the key theoretical concept. Institutions, in the sense used here, are stable patterns of human behavior that structure, legitimize, or delegitimize actions, relationships, and understandings within particular situations. Based on prior conceptualizations of institutions, a theoretical framework is presented that outlines 5 categories of "institutional carriers" for data practices: (a) norms and symbols, (b) intermediaries, (c) routines, (d) standards, and (e) material objects. These institutional carriers are central to understanding how scientific data and metadata practices originate, stabilize, evolve, and transfer. This institutional framework is applied to 3 case studies: the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS), the Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) network, and the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR). These cases are used to illustrate how institutional support for data and metadata management are not uniform within a single organization or academic discipline. Instead, broad spectra of institutional configurations for managing data and metadata exist within and across disciplines and organizations.

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Author Mayernik, Matthew
Publisher UCAR/NCAR - Library
Publication Date 2016-04-01T00:00:00
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Topic Category geoscientificInformation
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Metadata Date 2025-07-11T20:49:40.341112
Metadata Record Identifier edu.ucar.opensky::articles:18055
Metadata Language eng; USA
Suggested Citation Mayernik, Matthew. (2016). Research data and metadata curation as institutional issues. UCAR/NCAR - Library. https://n2t.org/ark:/85065/d7kp83pj. Accessed 02 August 2025.

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