The Birth of LDbase: Lessons Learned from Designing a Discipline-Specific Data Repository

Online

What makes a data repository different from an institutional repository? What are the benefits and drawbacks of creating a discipline-specific repository compared to one for a more general audience? How do you design a repository that runs on metadata you don’t understand? These are questions that FSU librarians were forced to confront when planning LDbase, a community-focused repository specifically designed for collecting data from learning disabilities studies. This session will explore the problems and solutions discovered from that planning process, tackle thorny philosophical issues related to the purpose of digital repositories, and discuss how people from different academic worlds can learn to understand each other.