Image Management as a Data Service

Across all disciplines, researchers are creating or gaining access to an ever-growing body of digitized images. Since research data management includes the organization of ‘all materials’ intrinsic to a research project, a robust data management plan will include a path for images as well as data in the more traditional sense. While researchers across disciplines have a long history with the organization of numeric data, the inclusion of images as a resource set in research is only starting to take shape across the disciplines. This paper is intended for data librarians or academic support staff without expertise in image data management. The primary focus is to apply traditional data management practices to images and to discuss the challenges associated with managing image collections through the research data lifecycle.