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The purpose of this paper is to understand the landscape of data curation services among public and academic libraries in the USA, with a focus on library capacity for providing data curation services.

The authors conducted an online survey by employing stratified sampling from the American Library Directory. A total of 198 responses were analyzed.

The authors’ findings provide insight into the current landscape of libraries’ data curation services. The survey participants evaluated six capacity dimensions for both public and academic libraries – value, financial, administrative, technical infrastructure, human resources and network. The ratings the participants gave to these capacity dimensions were significantly different between academic and public libraries.

This study suggests several areas in which libraries will benefit from further developing their capacity to successfully run data curation services.

This is among the first research study to address the concept of capacity in the context of libraries’ data curation services.

This paper presents results of a study on data managers' perspectives on the evolution of Designated Communities and the FAIR Principles using an example of a geological repository.

The study employed 10 semi-structured interviews with data managers at a state geological survey and qualitative analysis of the interview transcripts.

The Designated Community for a collection in this data repository has evolved from petroleum industry users to include academic researchers and the public. This change was accompanied by significant user interaction changes from in-person, reference interview-style conversations to anonymous digital, automated interactions. The main factors driving these changes were developments in technology which allowed the data managers to shift data discovery and access into the online environment. The online data portal has seen increasing non-expert use, driving the data team to develop additional services for these new communities. Repository data team participants varied in their familiarity with the FAIR Principles and their perceptions of the FAIRness of the data in the repository.

The study was limited to one organization in the United States. However, the results are applicable to other data environments working through the tensions between high-level global frameworks such as FAIR, and continuing to serve the day-to-day needs of their designated communities. Continued work on how to assess success in this complex space is needed.

This paper lies at the nexus of two digital preservation frameworks and contributes to a limited extant literature providing guidance on implementing the concept of a Designated Community in practice.

The purpose of this case study is to describe and interpret the PREservation Metadata: Implementation Strategies (PREMIS) implementation process, to gain more insight into why barriers to the adoption of PREMIS exist as well as how to overcome them.

This qualitative case study analysis highlights the Florida Digital Archive as an exemplar of an organization in the throes of deciding just how to implement the PREMIS metadata model in a working repository system.

Findings from this study suggest that use of PREMIS requires adaptation in which an organization must make changes in order to use PREMIS, and vice versa. Findings also suggest that there are clearly defined steps involved in the PREMIS implementation process, and that the nature of this process is iterative.

This study is limited by a short data collection period. It is also limited by investigating only one institution during its implementation process. Future studies could test the validity of the model proposed in this study and include multiple institutions.

By providing context for the implementation process, this paper can help cultural heritage institutions interested in fully adopting PREMIS.

Exploring PREMIS implementation using DOI/MIS literature is novel in the digital preservation community and is proposed as particularly useful to digital preservationists who are considering adopting PREMIS. The paper suggests that seemingly innocuous decisions by developers have real implications for preservation.