Because good research needs good data

You are here

Home » Guidance

Digital curation standards

For digital curation and data preservation initiatives to be successful, activities must be based upon sound and tested standards that promote best practice.

The DCC is committed to providing a standards watch that will play a vital role in the testing and certification of new tools and trusted digital repositories.

Disciplinary Metadata

The issue of disciplinary metadata standards - what they are, who's using them, how to use them - has been gaining attention in the RDM community. To support this, we have created an online resource for those who need help figuring out what standards might address their own needs.

Rather than archival metadata standards, the resource focuses on descriptive standards that aid data discovery and re-use; this is the information a repository manager might give a researcher curious about what his or her discipline has decided should be the minimum information kept alongside their data sets. The initial focus has been on metadata standards for tab-delimited data.

If we're missing your favourite standard, please let us know! We're also particularly interested in hearing about your own experiences in implementing disciplinary metadata standards.

The DCC Standards Watch

Amongst those resources we use to instil sound digital curation standards across the higher education sector is the Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS). 

This external resource is an international standard endorsed by the DCC for use in digital preservation planning and management (ISO 14721: 2003). We also refer to the model in the course of our own development activity.

In addition, we have repurposed and published material from DIFFUSE, a DCC project that saw us collect information on standards relevant to the electronic exchange of information. Please note that no further additions will be made by the DCC. Nothing new has been added to this section since late 2009.

Consortia Advancing Standards in Research Administration Information (CASRAI)

CASRAI, an international non-profit dedicated to reducing administrative burden and improving impact measurement, have developed a dictionary in consultation with vocabulary experts and practitioners from a wide cross-section of stakeholder groups. The dictionary is meant to be a practical reference for individuals and working groups concerned with the improvement of research data management, and as a meeting place for further discussion and development of terms. The DCC participated in the Jisc supported CASRAI UK Working Group on Data Management Plans in 2014-15. The Working Group defined a profile for data management plans based around our checklist for data management plans. 

The CASRAI dictionary terms can be filtered to facilitate browsing. The two filters currently include:

The CASRAI dictionary is a pilot to demonstrate the value of a dedicated set of terms for the Research Data Domain. Each term has a unique identifier (UUID) and a URL that can be used as references to enhance reading comprehension of documents by hyperlinking terms to their definition. The URL for each term contains a link to a "Discussion" page to complete the feedback loop with the community of users. DCC will continue to cooperate with CASRAI on the development and agreement of Research Data terms.