Assessing Skills, Access and Trust of Data Use and Reuse within the ESIP community

From Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP)
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Sarah Ramdeen, Angela Murillo

The purpose of this study is to reflect on the current state of skills, access, and trust relating to data use and reuse within the ESIP member community. This study will specifically focus on the data lifecycle. The data lifecycle includes curation, access to data by the user community and the skills needed to perform these services or tasks. It is important to understand what skills are needed in searching for scientific data sets.

This includes research, technological and cognitive skills. Collections must be discoverable and accessible. In order to make use of a collection, users must be able to successfully search and find scientific data sets within these repositories and the resulting data must be in a format which is useable for their purposes. Finally, when accessing scientific data repositories, individuals must evaluate the trustworthiness of the collections and determine the quality of data it houses before deciding to use repository resources.

In order to learn more about these areas we will send a questionnaire to the ESIP community asking participants to recall their personal experiences with data use specifically the skills and training they felt they needed to be successful searchers, how they accessed collections, what barriers they encountered along the way, and finally, how they determined trustworthiness and quality of the data they discovered and ultimately used.