How we curate data

Data curation activities are integral to the research data life cycle. Planning for data preservation and dissemination is done in terms of the HSRC Data Preservation and Sharing Plan which is submitted to the HSRC Research Ethics Committee. Research data is submitted by research programmes to the Research Data Service for curation. The following curation activities are performed:

• Auditing of the deposited data and documents
• Checking and verification
• Addressing confidentiality issues
• Loading files into the HSRC's file repository
• Describing data and documents in terms of DDI (Data Documentation Initiative) and Dublin Core metadata standards respectively
• Generating unstructured metadata which describes the data and facilitates use, i.e. a read me file, user guide and code book
• Converting files to preservation and dissemination formats

The data is subsequently made available for re-use.