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Description
Title: | Shedding Light on the Dark Data in the Long Tail of Science |
Author(s): | Heidorn, P. Bryan |
Subject(s): | Institutional repositories
Data curation Small science Dark data |
Abstract: | One of the primary outputs of the scientific enterprise is data, but many institutions such as libraries that are charged with preserving and disseminating scholarly output have largely ignored this form of documentation of scholarly activity. This paper focuses on a particularly troublesome class of data, termed dark data. “Dark data” is not carefully indexed and stored so it becomes nearly invisible to scientists and other potential users and therefore is more likely to remain underutilized and eventually lost. The article discusses how the concepts from long-tail economics can be used to understand potential solutions for better curation of this data. The paper describes why this data is critical to scientific progress, some of the properties of this data, as well as some social and technical barriers to proper management of this class of data. Many potentially useful institutional, social, and technical solutions are under development and are introduced in the last sections of the paper, but these solutions are largely unproven and require additional research and development. |
Issue Date: | 2008 |
Publisher: | Johns Hopkins University Press and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign |
Citation Info: | In Library Trends 57 (2) Fall 2008: 280-299. |
Genre: | Article |
Type: | Text |
Language: | English |
URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/2142/10672 |
ISSN: | 0024-2594 |
Publication Status: | published or submitted for publication |
Rights Information: | Copyright 2008 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois |
Date Available in IDEALS: | 2011-01-01 |
This item appears in the following Collection(s)
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Library Trends 57 (2) Fall 2008: Institutional Repositories: Current State and Future
Library Trends 57 (2) Fall 2008: Institutional Repositories: Current State and Future. Edited by Sarah L. Shreeves and Melissa H. Cragin