Enhancing the Dash service: A Self-depositing Tool for Research Data

Abstract: 

University libraries and other data repositories are continually asked to support research data curation as a consequence of evolving funder mandates, pre-publication requirements, institutional policies, and norms of scholarly practice.  As an alternative to free commercial alternatives such as figshare and Dropbox and to offer the added services of long term preservation reliability, and open sharing of the data,  the UC Curation Center’s (UC3) California Digital Library created the Dash curation service of the to meet all of these needs.  At present, the Dash service is not a repository itself, but an overlay submission and discovery layer sitting on top of CDL’s Merritt preservation repository that provides drag-n-drop upload, metadata entry, DOI assignment, faceted search/browse, and a plug-in mechanism for extension by reconfiguring rather than recoding.   After several years of providing the Dash service, UC3 received feedback from service users that some additional functionality and a redesigned user interface would be desirable, so a proposal was made to and funded by the Sloan Foundation to re-factor the infrastructure behind Dash, and to improve the front-end user experience of the existing self-service deposit service.   The Dash service upgrade will continue to use the underlying micro-services architecture of extending repository functionality by developing  small, independent, protocol-linked components rather than by adding to large, monolithic systems.  Thus, the Dash submission, harvesting and discovery overlay layer is being extended to apply to any standards-compliant repository supporting the SWORD submission and OAI-PMH metadata harvesting protocols.   

Collaboration Area: 
Creative Common License: 
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
Author(s):