Building Interdisciplinary Data Curation Partnerships

NYU Data Services received dedicated funding for the 2024-2025 academic year to curate urban data–broadly defined as data about cities and their populations, a theme that cuts across data in many different academic disciplines. This lightning talk will present the results of this opportunity, which allowed us to pilot a student data curator position. The student worker has the specific responsibilities of liaising between our department and an urban policy institute at NYU; conducting a university-wide landscape analysis to locate creators of urban data; and creating subject-specific documentation guidelines. The talk will discuss the results of this project to date, including methodology for the landscape analysis and observations about training a student curator. It will also detail the lessons learned, and plans to build on this project in the future.