Principles of Data Acquisition

At the request of faculty, students and staff, UCLA Library will consider the acquisition of data sets. In order for the Library to pursue the acquisition, the data must meet the following criteria:

• Be of broad educational interest and meet an existing demand for use in research, teaching and instruction at UCLA.
• Be open source, licensed or purchased.
• Have access terms that allow the data to be made available to the entire UCLA research community, including walk-in users.
• Be organized, described and easily accessed via the UCLA Library Catalog and other library-based discovery tools.
• Have formats that are standard and appropriate for preservation (i.e., TIFF for images, WAV for audio, MOV for moving images, XML for structured data, PDF/A for documents). Any data in compressed formats must be easily decoded with software that is present on the Library network (e.g., Microsoft Excel). The format must be supported by the Library’s computing environment, and the data need to be accessible online.
• Be in a public-use version, containing no personal identifiers.
• Have reasonable costs that adequately reflect the value of the resource.

In addition, the data should also meet the following criteria:

• Be current and not require the purchase of frequent updates.
• Be accompanied by adequate documentation.

Hosting: Data can be stored locally in standard formats, remotely, by third parties or other campus partners. If the data exist freely at another site, access will be provided via a link placed in the Catalog and other discovery tools as appropriate. The Library will not harvest this data and host it locally.

Licensing: If data can be acquired with no apparent restrictions or terms, the Library will proceed with acquisition after the licensing coordinator has verified this with the provider of the data. If the data requires an agreement, the Library will only acquire it if terms reflect user needs and are in accordance with the Library’s standard agreements. By advocating for reasonable license agreements and pricing models, the Library hopes to influence and change the market to recognize the educational mission of publicly funded institutions.