LibGuides: Sustainable Digital Scholarship@HKUL: Benefits

Benefits

Sustainable & Future Access

By addressing the ‘sustainability’ of your digital projects, you could extend the lifespan of your project data and retain their values for as many decades as possible even if the project has come to an end. It brings you future access to your project data regardless of the rapid technology obsolescence or data loss due to hardware degradation.

In terms of sustainability, there are four main elements contributing to a piece of sustainable data:

Findable

Data shall be made findable by others in order to provide opportunities for new possible collaborations or projects in the future.

Accessible

Effort shall be made to make data openly available to access by others if possible, unless there are property ownership as well as legal and ethical concerns.

Interoperable

Data and its metadata shall be stored in forms that are readable by various machines without specialized applications for easy integration with other data during analysis or processing.

Reusable

Data shall stay ‘lively’ and could be continuously updated, so that those data which may be of value to others could be reused for replicating results or generating new findings.

Your work could be made into vital resources that could be of use to others in the future.

Reduction of Data Management Cost

As the Sustainable Digital Scholarship services are centralized data management services offered by the Libraries, faculties and departments could save the expenditures for Information Technology and data management support by themselves. Faculties and departments are encouraged to make use of the currently available resources and infrastructure in support of their digital projects.

Visible Measurement of Your Project Impact

Citation counts and analytic statistics are available for data preserved and published on DataHub. Sharing your project data on DataHub via the SDS services offers you fast access to the statistics on basic analysis of the impact of your project data. Those measurable indicators could be a better evidence of your project impact.