Sometimes researchers have data that simply gets away from them. The project started small and grew over time and the data that grew along with the project simply became unwieldy. Often when researchers receive a grant they simply want to get started doing the project. The data that is collected gets stored in files on someone's computer. The researcher thinks they will surely remember how things are organized. Time rolls on and the data gets bigger and bigger. Looking at the data several years down the road the researcher team realizes that the data wasn't really organized or labelled very well. This underscores the need to organize and decide on access points at the beginning of a project.
It is known the by far the largest hazard to the sustainability is human error. I was reminded this week of a project where many of these stories have been documented for the community. These could all be tagged as #avoidthesepitfalls DataONE has collected these stories that they describe as "cautionary tales from researchers." You can find these stories - some accompanied by video - at
https://www.dataone.org/data-stories
I think these stories would be very useful as mobilization tools for the librarians and IT personnel charged with helping to solve these issues for researchers, if not for the researchers themselves.
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