Onboarding Bespoke Datasets: A Case Study

In early 2024, Stanford Graduate School of Business Library acquired a bespoke collection of datasets from MSCI – a financial research and data organization renowned for their proprietary global indexes, ESG (environmental, social, and governance), and climate change data. As we were onboarding the ESG dataset into our collection, we encountered multiple obstacles in the process due to its complex structure and size. Through a close collaboration between librarians and a data scientist, we were able to assess problems in real-time, brainstorm scalable solutions, format and create a collection of comprehensive documentation, and ultimately introduce the new content to our constituents.

This poster will delve into the collaborative and iterative process of ingesting the ESG data set specifically, describing and grouping the 28 individual data tables (including aggregating existing content from disparate locations and creating new supporting documentation), and launching the new dataset to Stanford University researchers.