The Sheridan Libraries have been awarded $20 million for data curation from the National Science Foundation (NSF).
The award, which was announced last Thursday, will provide funding towards the Data Conservancy project.
The principal investigator on the project was Sayeed Choudhury, an associate dean at the library and the Hodson Director of the Digital Research and Curation Center, who called the award "an opportunity to define a blueprint for research libraries in the digital age."
"Fundamentally, this award recognizes the growing importance of data-intensive research and learning," Choudhury wrote in an e-mail to the News-Letter.
The project will be developed over the next five years to create an infrastructure that will better manage digital information.Choudhury felt that Hopkins undergraduates will see the direct results of this project.
"Eventually, through the Data Conservancy, undergraduates will be able to seamlessly discover data that they need for research or courses without having to search multiple Web sites or disparate resources," he wrote.
Eight Hopkins faculty members from a wide variety of departments were involved with the award: Alex Szalay, Bruce Marsh and Katalin Szlavecz from Krieger; Joel Bader, Randal Burns, Charles Meneveau and Andreas Terzis from Whiting; and Jeff Boeke from the School of Medicine.
"While the primary focus of this NSF grant relates to the sciences and engineering, the use of data is increasing in the social sciences and humanities as well," Choudhury wrote.
He cited the Roman de la Rose digital library, a collaboration between the Sheridan Libraries and the Biblioth??que nationale de France, which works to digitize manuscripts from the French library.
This award is one of the first grants for the Institute of Data Intensive Engineering and Sciences.
"In order to support these new forms of data-intensive research and learning that are even more prevalent in the sciences and engineering, it's absolutely critical to build infrastructure that preserves the data and offers access to the data in meaningful ways," Choudhury wrote.
"This grant will allow us to start the process of building this scalable infrastructure so that researchers can reliably access data, especially toward studying trans-disciplinary research questions."
The award is part of the DataNet program being sponsored by the NSF, a $100 million preservation and curation project being funded.
The funding will be allocated over the next five years. Hopkins will share funds with nine partner institutions, including Cornell University, the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the Marine Biological Laboratory.
In addition, the libraries have received $300,000 in grants fron the NSF towards examining the creation of an open-access database for research.
The Sheridan Libraries includes the Milton S. Eisenhower Library, as well as the collections housed in the Evergreen House and the George Peabody Library at Mt. Vernon Place.
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