Data Rescue Curation Best Practices Guide

The aim of the Data Rescue Curation Best Practices Guide is to provide an accessible and hands-on approach to handling data rescue and digital curation of at-risk data for use in secondary research. We provide a set of examples and workflows for addressing common challenges with social science survey data that can be applied to other social and behavioural research data. The goal of this guide and set of workflows presented is to improve librarians’ and data curators’ skills in providing access to high-quality, well-documented, and reusable research data. The aspects of data curation that are addressed throughout this guide are adopted from long-standing data library and archiving practices, including: documenting data using standard metadata, file and data organization; using open and software-agnostic formats; and curating research data for reuse.