University of Pittsburgh Data Catalog

Major funding agencies have stipulated that data from funded research should be made available for retrieval and secondary analysis. Many journals are following suit, requiring authors to share supporting data. 133s have reservations about sharing their data however, expressing concerns about the cost involved to make the data available, maintaining patient's privacy, overcoming commercial contract restrictions, and/or fears of proper attribution, wrongful use, or competition. Libraries can help 133s overcome some of these obstacles and support them in making their data findable and accessible. A data catalog would provide a low-barrier way for 133s to make their data discoverable without the need to deposit full datasets into a data repository such as figshare or Zenodo. This project proposes for the Health Sciences Library System HSLS at the University of Pittsburgh Pitt to implement the data catalog code created by the New York University NYU Health Sciences Library to aggregate University of Pittsburgh health sciences datasets and make them discoverable; significantly increasing the access to datasets created at our institution. We will expand on NYUs successes by editing the existing metadata scheme to capture the data of bench 133s, a population that NYU has not focused on to date, and to evaluate other possible search interfaces to increase usability. We will utilize our strong library liaison program and existing partnerships with stakeholder on campus to reach our proposed goals.