Collaborative Preservation: Understanding Needs of Researchers For Future Reuse

Making choices about research data preservation can present a challenge for both researchers and repository service providers. Our team wanted to explore the needs and understandings of data preservation held by researchers and how we might address them in practice. Specifically, we designed a collaborative project to carry out two case studies with heritage-focused researchers. The project has both practical outputs (preservation plans for specific projects selected by the researchers) as well as opportunities to analyze the ways in which we talk about and approach the development of those plans. This project took a participatory action approach with the participants as researchers. All meetings and interviews were recorded and transcribed. This presentation will focus on the partnership and collaboration between digital preservation practitioners and researchers to gain an understanding of our different worlds so we can come together and support the long-term access and reuse of research data.