Digitization, Data Curation, and Human Rights Documents: Case Study of a Library-Researcher-Practitioner Collaboration

At Purdue University Libraries, a project involving the digitization of Amnesty International Urgent Action Bulletins from 1974-2007 combined the strengths of political science and library science researchers. The political science research was centered on transnational human rights advocacy and legal instrumentation changes over time, while the Libraries’ research related to data management, data lifecycle and curation, metadata, and collaborative research modeling. The conceptual framework of this case study is rooted in the literature on embedded librarianship and lifecycle models of data curation. We investigate the intersections and alignments between scholarly workflow and curatorial workflow, and the implications of these intersections and alignments in collaborative research and curatorial lifecycles. The case study also examines how library resources supported research, and how library science and political science experts collaborated in research through the development of a conceptual model. A research collaboration model was developed specifically for the human rights texts project, but was then generalized to be applicable for a variety of practitioner-librarian collaboration projects. The research resulted in data production, data curation, data management, data publication, and scholarly communication and dissemination.