Cyberinfrastructure Supporting Evolving Data Collections

The requirements to support large-scale and complex research collections are growing at an accelerated pace. Considering the continuous evolution of the collections, their increasing sizes, the technologies supporting them, and the importance of adequate data management to long-term preservation, a team at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) developed a cyberinfrastructure to aid researchers in the creation, management, and curation of collections throughout the research lifecycle processes and beyond for access and long term preservation. Collections are maintained on a petabyte-scale data applications facility, and consulting services are available to address data curation needs. In this environment, researchers have the flexibility to build their collections without having to deal with details such as systems administration and hardware migration planning. The cyberinfrastructure facilitates the development of sustainable collections and a seamless transition through data gathering and curation, large-scale analysis, and collections dissemination and preservation.