Do you or your data manager spend a lot of time responding to requests for your research data? The UC San Diego Library has a solution: a new service to support publication of frequently updated data files. This service was inspired by a request from the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes (CW3E) at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography to automatically publish daily sensor array readings in the Research Data Collections repository. The Library’s software development team responded by writing a set of scripts that collect the files uploaded by researchers to RDL-share (the Library’s file transfer service) and update the data files that can be downloaded from the corresponding repository pages. Researchers that leverage this service provide access to dynamic data, while decreasing the workload for the data manager responding to requests for these highly-demanded datasets.
If you are interested in using this free service, or if you have questions about depositing your data in the Research Data Collections repository, the Library’s Research Data Curation team is here to help. Contact us at research-data-curation@ucsd.edu.
Photo credit: GOES 17 weather satellite imagery of atmospheric rivers courtesy of NOAA NESDIS STAR, taken from the CW3E site.