UMSI researchers explore the value of data curation
Wednesday, 08/12/2026
Last Updated: Wednesday, 08/12/2026
By Noor HindiPublishing a dataset and making it public does not guarantee it is accessible, usable or understandable.
Researchers must first clean, document and preserve the data so that it remains meaningful to people beyond the original creators. New research led by the University of Michigan School of Information PhD graduate Morgan Wofford argues that this work, known as data curation, should be recognized as essential research infrastructure.
Drawing on interviews with data repository employees, funders, researchers and other stakeholders, the authors identify five ways people value curation infrastructures: supporting long-term sustainability, improving research efficiency, fostering trust, building scholarly communities and advancing data equity by lowering barriers to access. The paper also examines why this labor and infrastructure, despite that shared value, are often overlooked and underfunded.
“Valuing curation infrastructures” received the 2026 Best JASIST Paper Award from the Association for Information Science and Technology. The annual award recognizes the strongest refereed paper published in the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology. An award juror noted that the article was “an accessible and convincing exploration of the importance of curation and the validity of framing it as an element of infrastructure.”
Wofford, the lead author of the study, based the article on 67 interviews with employees and external stakeholders of the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, or ICPSR, a social science data repository based at the University of Michigan. External participants included funders, data producers and people who reuse data.
“When you make data publicly available, you can’t just throw it online as is,” Wofford says. “Curation is all the work that goes into cleaning, documenting and preserving the data so other people can actually use it for years to come.”
This requires sustaining a large infrastructure that includes social, technical and economic support to succeed over time.
For a social science dataset, that work might include identifying missing values and documenting why they are absent, explaining what each variable means, describing how the data were collected and clarifying what the dataset can and cannot be used to study, all while maintaining files as formats and technologies change.
But curation is more than a set of discrete tasks. Sustained over time and across datasets, it forms the infrastructure that keeps data usable long after the original project ends
“It’s a library of data, basically,” Wofford says.
The interviewees identified value in curation infrastructures when they perceived these infrastructures preserved information, built trust and made research more efficient. By documenting how datasets were created and how they can be used and sustained over time, curators help researchers reuse reliable data across disciplines and build on one another’s work.
But because curation operates as infrastructure, the labor behind it can easily disappear from view.
“Really good curation is never seen,” Wofford says. “People don’t necessarily know it exists and how it’s helping them. There’s less desire to fund something when you’re not seeing or realizing the benefit.”
The timelines used to fund research infrastructures can make that problem worse. A grant may last three years, while the benefits of a data repository can take much longer to emerge. The infrastructure must be built, populated and maintained before researchers have time to discover and reuse the information it holds.
Wofford says funders may also be more enthusiastic about building new tools than maintaining infrastructure that already exists.
“People get excited about funding infrastructure, and they’re much less excited about continuing to fund its maintenance,” Wofford says. “It’s no longer new, but it still needs to be sustained.”
The researchers also found that stakeholders viewed data equity as an important, but difficult to achieve, benefit of curation.
Researchers at under-resourced universities, community colleges and community organizations may not have the money or institutional connections needed to collect large datasets themselves. Well-curated public data can reduce those barriers by giving them access to information that already exists.
“Good curation lowers barriers so researchers at under-resourced schools or community colleges can work with data without insider connections,” Wofford says.
The study calls for funding structures and measures of research impact that recognize the long-term value of curation. Treating curation as infrastructure, the authors argue, makes clear that it is not an optional step added after research is complete. It is what allows open data to remain understandable, trustworthy and useful.
The award was announced two days after Wofford defended her dissertation.
“We worked very hard on that paper, and it took a long time,” Wofford says. “It was great to see curation, funding infrastructure and those kinds of issues valued in that way.”
“Valuing curation infrastructures” was co-authored by Andrea Thomer, associate professor in the University of Arizona College of Information Science; UMSI associate professor Libby Hemphill,; former UMSI student Katherine Polasek; and Elizabeth Yakel, professor emerita of information at UMSI.
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