The Emerging Role of Libraries in Data Curation and E-science

The role of libraries is to collect, preserve, and disseminate the intellectual output of the society. This output includes books and serials as well as the digital versions of the same. Scientists, other scholars, and all of society are now producing, storing, and disseminating digital data that underpin the aforementioned documents in much larger volumes than the text. The survival of this data is in question since the data are not housed in long-lived institutions such as libraries. This situation threatens the underlying principles of scientific replicability since in many cases data cannot readily be collected again. Libraries are the institutions that could best manage this intellectual output.