Data repositories currently constitute essential programs within institutions. In fact, universities are the primary institutions that promote the creation, management and storage for the safekeeping of a variety of documents, data and/or projects. This work is carried out within the framework of institutional need and the application of knowledge…

According to researchers at the University of Southern California (Washington Post, 2011), the world's storage capacity for digital data increased from 0.2 billion gigabytes in 1986 to 276 billion gigabytes by 2007 (at the same time analogue storage capacity increased from 2.6 to 18.9 billion gigabytes). This huge growth is often seen in…

As data as a scholarly object continues to grow in importance in the research community, librarians are undertaking increasing responsibilities regarding data management and curation. New library initiatives include assisting researchers in finding data sets for reuse; locating and hosting repositories for required archiving; consultations on…

S. R. Ranganathan's five laws of library science, originally published in 1931, provide the basis for reflections on current trends in academic libraries.

Discusses the degree to which historians have been involved in the data archiving movement and the challenges it presents to their discipline. Concludes that American historians are less involved with machine-readable data in their research than are social scientists in general and that they should attempt to utilize more such data in an attempt…