Data curations by the Dutch Data Curation Service: Overview and future perspective

Data curation comprises activities such as digitizing data (where necessary), converting the data so as to conform to accepted standard formats, (re)shaping metadata and adding documentation. In this contribution we present the motivation for a data curation service (DCS) in the CLARIN-NL project, and the activities the DCS employed during the past years in curating a variety of resources, including dialect dictionaries, speech databases for language acquisition and interview data. In the second part, we present a view on how in the future data curation is best addressed as an integral part of research data management and what could be the role for an expertise centre like the DCS in this context. We envisage and advocate a shift in the future in which data management becomes an integral part of the overall research data management plan (DMP) right from the start of a project. For researchers the university libraries are a natural entry point for data management issues. The data expertise centres can be installed as back offices for consultancy and data curation tasks.