According to a new article, “Purdue University Libraries is leading the development of a new, online resource that will help people locate research data on the Internet. The project is called Databib and will engage a community of librarians from around the world to collaborate in creating an online bibliography of data repositories that can be used by researchers, students, funding agencies, and other librarians to find appropriate places to access and share research data. The Institute of Museum and Library Sciences, a federal research agency, awarded a grant to support the project.”

Michael Witt, the project’s principal investigator stated, “Funding agencies such as the National Science Foundation recognize the importance of sharing research data and have begun requiring that all grant proposals be submitted with plans for managing and sharing data…  Databib will be a tool that helps researchers who produce data determine where to submit and publish their datasets, too.”

The article adds, “The project also will serve as a testbed for presenting, linking and integrating information about data repositories in new ways. Records from Databib will be integrated into social book marking services and made available for libraries to import into their catalogs. They will also be exposed as Linked Data, which is an implementation of the Semantic Web that seeks to create a ‘web of data.’”

Image: Courtesy Purdue