Lee Wilson
Portage Service Manager
CARL Portage
Corey Davis
Digital Preservation Network Coordinator
COPPUL/University of Victoria
Donna Bourne-Tyson
University Librarian
Dalhousie University
The stewardship of research data requires support for researchers at all stages of the research lifecycle to ensure that valuable data is findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR). While several excellent institutional, domain-specific, and more general repositories currently exist both within Canada and abroad, the question of where to deposit data for discovery, reuse, and preservation remains pervasive. Portage was established by the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) in 2015 to support the shared stewardship of research data through a Network of Expertise that assists libraries with providing research data management (RDM) services on their campuses and through partnerships with infrastructure providers to make RDM platforms widely available. This session will provide an overview of the progress made since Portage and the Canadian RDM landscape was first presented to CNI in 2015, highlighting three platforms that will support researchers and institutions through a model of shared data services: the DMP Assistant, a national, bilingual, data management planning platform and associated metadata templates; the joint Portage-Compute Canada Federated Research Data Repository (FRDR); and Dataverse North, a national effort to coordinate services and offerings of Dataverse-based repositories operating in several Canadian academic institutions. The session will provide comparisons of system architecture, metadata schema, user interfaces, workflow, and search capabilities between the two repository systems, enabling a broader view of key areas for future integration and feature extension through existing open source RDM tools for researcher collaboration, data manipulation and visualization, and preservation. We will also present our vision for seamless, equitable access to RDM platforms and services for Canadian institutions and researchers through a distributed service model that supports institutions both locally and nationally.