Pioneers in the Wild West: Managing data collections

During the last few years, many academic libraries have accepted the challenge of helping their users locate and acquire the numeric data they need. To meet their users’ ever-increasing need for data, librarians are purchasing data sets one at a time (“small data”). This service, though important to our users, raises many issues in the areas of collection scope, acquisition procedures, and discovery and access. The authors conducted a survey of data librarians in summer 2015 and followed up by interviewing five data librarians in depth to report on how academic libraries collect and manage small data and to explore the strengths and weaknesses of various approaches.