Data preservation practices for enhancing agricultural research data usage among agricultural researchers in Tanzania
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Date
2022
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Journal of Librarianship and Information Science
Abstract
The objective of this study was to investigate the role of research data preservation for enhanced data usage among agricultural
researchers in Tanzania. Specifically, the study aimed to examine the data preservation methods used by agriculture researchers,
find out how long agriculture researchers preserve their agriculture research data, and determine factors that influence agriculture
researchers on their choice of data preservation methods for use. The study employed a cross-sectional research design. The study
employed both qualitative and quantitative approaches. A survey was conducted to collect data in 11 research institutions. A simple
random sampling technique was used to select 204 respondents from the study area while purposive sampling techniques were used
to select 11 agriculture research institutions including 10 Tanzanian Agricultural Research Institution (TARI) centers, and Sokoine
University of Agriculture (SUA). Also, 12 respondents were selected purposively for an in-depth interview as key informants. The
study adopted Data Curation Centre (DCC) Lifecycle Model to explain data preservation process. Findings indicated that a majority
of more than 90% of researchers preferred to preserve their data using different storage devices such as field notebooks, computers,
and institutional libraries. Moreover, findings indicated that about 74% of agricultural researchers preferred to preserve their data
for more than 6 years after the end of the project. Findings also indicated factors that influence researchers in the choice of data
preservation methods to be easy to reach, cost-effective storage devices, support to use the devices, adequate infrastructure for data
preservation, and reliable power supply. It can be concluded that there is yet a great role of research data preservation in enhancing
data usage among researchers in Tanzania. It is recommended that the government should establish an agricultural research data bank
to guarantee permanent availability of data at all times when needed.
Description
Article
Keywords
Agricultural research data, Data preservation, Data reuse, Data sharing, Data storage
Citation
The Author(s) 2022 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions https://doi.org/10.1177/09610006221138110 DOI: 10.1177/09610006221138110 journals.sagepub.com/home/lis