A look back at the Université de Lorraine's first curators' seminar

Updated at: 10/11/2023

The Université de Lorraine began organizing a network of curators a few months after the DOREL institutional repository was set up in 2021. This repository, running on Dataverse, is already harvested in its institutional space within the Recherche Data Gouv repository, and will migrate there in the first half of 2024).

This network of 13 volunteers (research engineers, researchers) covers 11 of the 60 laboratories at the Université de Lorraine. It complements DOREL's 4-person central curation team, and aims to provide local disciplinary support for researchers in the research units concerned. This network will become an integral part of the national Recherche Data Gouv curator network.

On September 28, a 3-hour seminar was held for network members. The aim was to reflect and move forward together on curation practices and objectives. The program included a number of presentations to get things started:

  • a reminder of the essentials, on expectations and practices, as well as a presentation of the upcoming migration schedule;
  • a presentation of the differences between DOREL and the national repository by Camille Désiles (team of curators of the generic space of the Recherche Data Gouv repository);
  • a presentation by Stéphane Schneider (Ressources Linguistiques Multilingues, Inist-CNRS) of the Loterre tool, invaluable for guiding depositors through the difficult question of validated keywords.

Last but not least: in small disciplinary groups, participants were invited to cogitate on deliberately trapped data repository "cases" using a light version of the Recherche Data Gouv curation report template.

The result, in a way, exceeded the "objectives" set: many questions on the quality of (meta)data that were not necessarily foreseen in the answer sheet were raised, with interesting emulation and motivation for the future of data repository support on the Lorraine site. The experiment will be repeated in the medium term, at a date to be determined on the basis of the completion of the current migration procedure.

Submit / Publish a dataset