title: Dash Curation Service Infrastructure Enhancement: An Informed Extension & Redesign
creators: Nancy Hoebelheinrich Stephen Abrams
abstract: University libraries and data repositories are increasingly being asked to support research data curation as a consequence of funder mandates, pre-publication requirements, institutional policies, and evolving norms of scholarly practice. While free commercial alternatives such as figshare and Dropbox provide high service functionality and intuitive user experience that serve research data creators well, they do not offer long term preservation reliability, nor do they necessarily share the increasingly important value of open data. From the perspective of the research data creator, however, all of these factors are important and desirable, so a preservation repository service targeting the needs of researchers should provide them. The UC Curation Center (UC3) at the California Digital Library created its Dash research data portal to address these needs. Following the initial deployment of the Dash service UC3 received feedback from users that additional functionality and a redesigned user interface would be desirable. With funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation UC3 has re-factored the infrastructure behind Dash, and improved the front-end user experience of the existing deposit service. The Dash submission, harvesting, and discovery components are being extended to apply to any standards-compliant repository supporting the SWORD submission and OAI-PMH metadata harvesting protocols.
keywords: data curation; data repository micro-services sword submission protocol oai-pmh metadata harvesting protocol