Bringing Light to Dark Data: A Collaborative Next-Generation Storage and Metadata Project

Increases in the number, complexity, and size of computational research data have created significant challenges for both researchers and the resources that manage data and scaling storage capacity. There is also increased focus from universities, funders, and research communities on the value of data as an output of the research process, resulting in an interest to preserve research data as a resource and to ensure that it is openly available and re-usable for future research. We present a partnership project between Research Computing, the library-hosted Princeton Research Data Service, the Office of Information Technology, and Princeton’s academic and administrative departments to transform data management and storage with a comprehensive system that provides scalable storage infrastructure wrapped in services that engage with the entire life-cycle of a research project. The goals for this project include: increasing computing resource effectiveness while minimizing administrative burden; building a community of data managers who implement best practices in data management; offering robust metadata services for effective, efficient, and automated data description; offering a unified path for data of any size to be sustainably preserved and published in an open data repository for future re-use; and supporting and promoting a culture of internal data sharing and increased cross-disciplinary collaboration.