Data Curation 101 for Theological Librarians

Abstract

Curating data is a new job skill for theological librarians. Apart from certain subfields that cross over with psychology and sociology, theological studies is not a data-driven discipline. Theological students have not needed to master statistics to study Augustine, Julian of Norwich, or Rosemary Radford Ruether. As theological researchers become interested in the digital humanities, they wind up producing data sets, which require description, preservation, and publication plans. The art of data curation is to guide researchers to sustainable and scalable practices of data sharing. Theological librarians have the opportunity to lead faculty and graduate students in these practices, steering them away from storing their data on thumb drives, network shares, and Dropbox to preserving their research in data repositories in standard formats with shared identifiers. A big task, no doubt!