Intellectual Merit: The rapid and dramatic rise of information technology and ubiquitous networking has transformed the research enterprise. Central to this transformation are digital data collections. The life-cycle management challenges associated with these intellectual assets are substantial. Issues concerning infrastructure development, sustainable economic models, new organizational capacities, and managing fast-paced technological change require focus and new approaches that reflect the complexity of the evolving scientific, technical, institutional, and economic digital data framework. Increasingly, academic libraries are engaging in projects and initiatives to preserve these digital assets. Given the sheer scope of the expanding digital data universe, it will be important to explore new organizational and economic models to ensure the long-term preservation of and access to these digital assets. This two-day workshop, to be held in the summer of 2006, brings together members of the research, data science, library, and commercial sectors to address these vital issues.
Broader Impacts: Recognizing the growing importance of digital data in research and education, NSF's Draft Cyberinfrastructure Vision for 21st Century Discovery describes a vision for the future "in which science and engineering digital data are routinely deposited in well-documented form, are regularly and easily consulted and analyzed by specialists and non-specialists alike, are openly accessible while suitably protected, and are reliably preserved." A 5-year goal to achieve this vision is "to catalyze the development of a system of science and engineering data collections that is open, extensible, and evolvable - a national digital data framework consist[ing] of a range of data collections and managing organizations ... simultaneously local, regional, national, and global in nature." Creating effective partnerships that will bring diverse communities together to pursue this vision and goals, and developing sustainable models to ensure long term preservation of the products of society's investment in research are among the central goals of this workshop
