Bridging the Gap: Perspectives on Institutional Archiving of Disciplinary Data (Invited)

Many would agree that there is no single road to becoming a data scientist. To date, the paths are as varied as the resulting skill sets. Many of today's data scientists have been plucked from their domains and asked to 'take one for the team' by turning their focus toward data management, rather than deeper research in the domain in which they trained. But this more domain-driven route is not the only approach. While my own early interactions with data were very domain-focused, my more recent work has been more directed toward infrastructure and processes. This submission will share a perspective developed generally from work on research data management based in the library of a research institution and specifically from three key ongoing activities: - Managing an archive of Data Release 7 of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey[1]; - Working with the Johns Hopkins University Data Management Services[2] team and institutional researchers to develop and operate an institutional data archive; and - Working with the Data Conservancy[3] to develop generalized infrastructure to support storage, archiving, preservation, curation, and integration of data across multiple domains. This environment and these roles require a slightly different skill set than those for more traditional -- if there is such a thing -- project- or domain-specific data scientists, while simultaneously providing exposure to those same scientists, their needs, and the motivators that drive them. [1] SDSS DR7 - http://www.sdss.org/dr7/ [2] Johns Hopkins University Data Management Services - https://dmp.data.jhu.edu/ [3] Data Conservancy - http://dataconservancy.org/