The University of California’s Digital Library (CDL) and its partners launched DataUp (http://dataup.cdlib.org/), a free data management tool. Researchers struggling to meet new data management requirements from funders, journals, and their own institutions can now use the DataUp Web application and a Microsoft Excel add-in to document and archive their tabular data.

The DataUp add-in operates within a program many researchers already use: Microsoft Excel. The web application allows users to upload tabular data in either Excel format or comma-separated value (CSV) format. Both the add-in and the web application allow users to do the following:

Perform a “best practices check” to ensure data are well-formatted and organized
Create standardized metadata, or a description of the data, using a wizard-style template
Retrieve a unique identifier for their dataset from their data repository
Post their datasets and associated metadata to the repository.

Although hundreds of data repositories are available for archiving, many scientific researchers either are unaware of their existence or do not know how to access them. One of the major outcomes of the DataUp project is the ONEShare repository, created specifically for DataUp, where users can deposit tabular data and metadata directly from the tool.

Source: Information Today, Inc. http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/Digest/California-Digital-Library-and-Partners-Launch-DataUp-85386.asp