Data collection and repositories

    Welcome back everyone,

I am glad to receive you once again on our blog. This is where we share informative and exciting stuff in our Library and Information Science profession. This week we are going to talk about data collection and data repositories and how these impact not only our profession but indeed the world as a whole. Data is collected on a daily basis and can be used in various aspects of our daily lives.This data can be used for research, academic work  and for our day to day lives and decision making.

Data collection is a term used to describe a process of preparing and collecting data.It is the systematic gathering of data for a particular purpose from various sources that have been systematically observed, recorded and organised, (Lafta, 2018). Some of the purposes of data collection are to obtain information, to keep on record, make important decisions on issues and to pass information to others. Data is classified into  mainly into 2 major categories and these are primary and secondary data, (Kumar, 2020). Primary data is original data that has been collected specifically for that purpose for the first time. It is useful for current and future studies. Primary data can either be qualitative or quantitative. Quantitative sources include surveys (personal, telephone), observations and experiments whilst qualitative include focus groups, in-depth interviews and case studies. Secondary data on the other hand is data that has been collected for another purpose and can be reused for other purposes. This can be data from a book or from previous other studies, (Borgman, 2015).

Data  repositories on the other hand are centralised places where data is stored and managed so it can be accessed, shared and analysed, (Peer, 2012). In simple terms a data repository is a system that collects, organises and stores data for easy retrieval in the future. These include systems such as databases, data warehouses , cloud based storage platforms, digital libraries and institutional information systems, (Fox et al., 2020). Primarily these repositories are there to ensure that date is securely maintained and readily accessible when it is required for use. For any repository to be highly effective the data collected must be of highest quality.

In conclusion data collection and data repositories are central to modern information systems the world over. whilst data collection ensures that relevant  and reliable information is generated, the data repositories ensure that such data is securely stored and easily accessible. From our discussion it is evident to see that it is almost impossible to separate the 2 as their purposes have a lot in common. 

REFERENCES

Borgman, C.L (2015). Big data, a little data,no data: scholarship in the networked world. MIT Press

Fox, G.C, Hey T & Trefethen, A.E. (2020). The data life-cycle in scientific data management. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 378 (2166), 2190072

Kumar, R (2020). Methods of data collection. Conference paper. Research methodology & Protocol Design.  DOI:10.13140/RG.2.2.26435.22561

Lafta, A.H (2018). Data Collection methods. DOI:10.13140/RG.2.2.23746.43205

Peer, L (2012). Building an open data repository for a specialised research community: process, challenges and lessons. The International journal of Digital Curation vol 7, issue 1, 2012






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