Evaluating Tools for Data Management Plans

Megan Finn, Amelia Acker, Sarika Sharma, and Yubing Tian (Ph.D. candidate, UW) are working on an NSF-sponsored project, Scientific Data Governance, Preservation and Archiving, investigating the life of scientific data, specifically in relation to National Science Foundation’s requirement for data management plans with a focus on the relationship between national science policies and different epistemic cultures.

Megan Finn, Ph.D. ’12, is an associate professor at the University of Washington Information School. Her work examines relations among institutions, infrastructures, and practices in the production, circulation, and use of information. She examines these themes in a book, Aftermath Documenting Aftermath: Information Infrastructures in the Wake of Disasters (MIT Press 2018).

Amelia Acker is an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin in the School of Information. Her research on data archives, cultures of computing, and preservation has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the Institute for Museum and Library Services. Acker’s current research focuses on cultures of mobile computing, emerging digital preservation models, data literacy, data durability, and metadata standards for exchange between private and public archives.

Sarika Sharma is a postdoctoral fellow on the Afterlives Project with Dr. Acker and Dr. Finn. She recently received her Ph.D. from the School of Information at Syracuse University. Her dissertation examined the institutional effects of the Report on the Blue-Ribbon Advisory Panel on Cyberinfrastructure established by the National Science Foundation in 2003 using theories of institutionalization and institutional logics to explain how data integration became a legitimate practice in the field of ecology.