Data stewardship: case studies from North-American, Dutch, and Finnish universities

Purpose - As national legislation, federated national services, institutional policies and institutional research service organizations may differ, data stewardship transpires differently in higher education institutions across the world. This work seeks to elaborate the picture of different data stewardship programs running in different institutional arrangements and research environments. Design/methodology/approach - Drawing from autoethnography and case study methods, this study described three distinct data stewardship programs from Purdue University (United States), Delft Technical University (Netherlands) and Aalto University (Finland). In addition, this work investigated the institutional arrangements and national research environments of the programs. The focus was on initiatives led by academic libraries or similar services. Findings - This work demonstrates that data stewardship may be understood differently within different national and institutional contexts. The data stewardship programs differed in terms of roles, organization and funding structures. Moreover, the mesh of policies and legislation, organizational structures, and national infrastructures differed. Originality - This work broadens the current literature on data stewardship by not only providing detailed descriptions of three distinct data stewardship programs, but also highlighting how research environments may affect their organization. We argue that the knowledge of institutional and national arrangements is a transversal requirement of data stewardship. Research limitations/implications - The data stewardship programs and their contexts develop, and the descriptions presented in this work should be considered as snapshots. Although individual researchers and research groups may undertake data stewardship activities, this study only investigated formalized services.