Embracing the Research Data Curation Challenge: A Library’s Journey with a CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow

Research libraries are developing services, staffing and skills to meet expected grant funders requirements for long term accessibility and discoverability of research data. The challenges of what is becoming known as data curation are particularly difficult for smaller university libraries when staff already fill multiple roles. The University of Miami Libraries has been fortunate in recruiting a postdoctoral fellow for data curation through the Council on Libraries and Information Resources (CLIR) Postdoctoral Fellowship program. A postdoctoral fellow trained in the sciences and experienced with data management can play a valuable “bridge” role to develop relationships with potential patrons for research data services and to build a collaborative community of data curators. As part of the library staff, a fellow also can serve as an internal resource for library personnel who will be involved in administrative or service functions for research data.