Moving data into and out of an institutional repository: Off the map and into the territory

Given the recent proliferation of institutional repositories, a key strategic question is how multiple institutions - repositories, archives, universities and others—can best work together to manage and preserve research data. In 2007, Green and Gutmann proposed how partnerships among social science researchers, institutional repositories and domain repositories should best work. This paper uses the Timescapes Archive—a new collection of qualitative longitudinal data— to examine the challenges of working across institutions in order to move data into and out of institutional repositories. The Timescapes Archive both tests and extends their framework by focusing on the specific case of qualitative longitudinal research and by highlighting researchers' roles across all phases of data preservation and sharing. Topics of metadata, ethical data sharing, and preservation are discussed in detail. What emerged from the work to date is the extremely complex nature of the coordination required among the agents; getting the timing right is both critical and difficult. Coordination among three agents is likely to be challenging under any circumstances and becomes more so when the trajectories of different life cycles, for research projects and for data sharing, are considered. Timescapes exposed some structural tensions that, although they can not be removed or eliminated, can be effectively managed.