Data Management of Confidential Data

Social science researchers increasingly make use of data that is confidential because it contains linkages to the identities of people, corporations, etc. The value of this data lies in the ability to join the identifiable entities with external data, such as genome data, geospatial information, and the like. However, the confidentiality of this data is a barrier to its utility and curation, making it difficult to fulfil US federal data management mandates and interfering with basic scholarly practices, such as validation and reuse of existing results. We describe the complexity of the relationships among data that span a public and private divide. We then describe our work on the CED AR prototype, a first step in providing researchers with a tool that spans this divide and makes it possible for them to search, access and cite such data. International Journal of Digital Curation (2013), 8(1), 265–278. http://dx.doi.org/10.2218/ijdc.v8i1.259 The International Journal of Digital Curation is an international journal committed to scholarly excellence and dedicated to the advancement of digital curation across a wide range of sectors. The IJDC is published by UKOLN at the University of Bath and is a publication of the Digital Curation Centre. ISSN: 1746-8256. URL: http://www.ijdc.net/ 266 Data Management doi:10.2218/ijdc.v8i1.259