Data Curation as Data Literacy Education: Grad’s Declassified Data Survival Guide

To support graduate students in managing their research projects through temporal gaps, we created a research data management guide for graduate students, providing easily implementable practices that can be integrated into projects and workflows with as minimal burden as possible to the student or interruption to their team. This quick-start guide is designed to teach graduate researchers data literacy through the curation of their own project materials. In other words, by learning curation best practices and integrating them into an existing research project—where they have a vested interest in seeing the project succeed—graduate students can also become comfortable with how to evaluate data for use in their future research, how to set up projects from the beginning to plan for starts and stops in the work, and how to effectively manage and describe project materials.