Professional Data Curation of Community Engagement in Northeast Houston, Texas: Geospatial Results from a Household Survey on the Disaster Experiences of Northeast Houston

The proposed project to ingest, curate, and disseminate the Community Engagement in Northeast Houston, Texas data has two broad goals: (1) to ensure the data are curated to be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) and (2) to advance ICPSRs scholarship about the relationship between data curation and data use/impact. To accomplish these two goals, we systematically collect information through three steps. 1. ICPSR collects and describes data attributes (gathered from the Community Engagement in Northeast Houston, Texas team) – Using the ICPSR deposit manager tool, we collect information from the Community Engagement in Northeast Houston, Texas project team as they deposit their data. The information we ask for is a description of the data attributes and the study that supported the collection of that data (e.g., funding source, number of variables, subject areas, study methodology, and existing publications). The information we gather through this step is critical to assuring data quality and usability, which ICPSR measures in the two subsequent steps. 2. ICPSR team collects and describes curatorial activities (gathered from ICPSRs data curators) – The data next enter the ICPSR curation process, where the curation staff will perform and capture all of ICPSR’s curatorial actions to improve the quality and usability of the data. Curatorial activities include level of disclosure risk review assessment of the deposited data, verification of the completeness of data and documentation, improving the data (to one of three curation levels), and performing a set of quality checks. ICPSR will apply its expert knowledge to evaluate the data deposit and apply the necessary steps to produce a high-quality data set that is FAIR. These activities are completed before the public release of the data. ICPSRs 3-level classification of curation activities ranges from level 1 curation (a base level of standardization actions) to level 3 (the highest level of standardization and/or involving a greater number of manual actions that enhance the quality and improve the use of the data). We plan to apply level one to the Community Engagement in Northeast Houston, Texas data. The information we gather through this step is critical to assuring data quality and usability. 3. ICPSR team collects and describes data use metrics (gathered from data users) – Upon release of the curated data, ICPSR will begin to capture usage information across several predefined data use and impact measures (e.g., views, download sessions, bibliographic citations). The usage metrics are made available to the research community for analysis and reporting.