But I Don't Have Access to Your Server, and My Grad Student Left Last Month: Meeting the Challenges of Data Transfer and Metadata Gathering

As sharing and preserving data become necessary for funding, and researchers become more familiar with the benefits of data sharing, there is less resistance to giving their data to a repository. The challenge now becomes how to get it there safely with the minimally required amount of description needed for adequate discovery, retrieval and usage. At UCSD, we have developed a number of web forms, tools, processes and strategies for transferring the data to a space shared by the data provider and the research data curation department, for understanding the structure of the data given to us, and collecting not only metadata on the item level, but collection level metadata and granular metadata about scripts and software used in analysis. We also collect information about copyright, licenses and potential access level restrictions. I will present our step by step process of acquiring data and metadata, and explain the points in the process where we use our tools and forms to facilitate communication between data provider and curator for a streamlined, mutually beneficial experience.