Disciplinary Improvements: Advancing Doctoral Education in Digital Libraries: Training in Research Data Management Using Cyberinfrastructure

The project provides travel support for U.S.-based Ph.D. students whose research emphasize Cyberinfrastructure for Research Data Management (RDM), enabling the students to attend the Doctoral Consortium (DC) of the 2026–2028 ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL). The goal of the JCDL DC is to help doctoral students develop their dissertation proposals and research plans through feedback and guidance from prominent professors and experienced practitioners in digital library research and development. The requested funds will also support seven best paper awards to be conferred by the conference awards committee. This project will provide financial support to motivated Ph.D. candidates to present published and ongoing work and receive feedback from a diverse group of established experts in digital libraries. The project will promote and advance research that leverages cyberinfrastructure to support RDM and broaden public access to research data. Mentor feedback can potentially enrich the content, enhance the technical soundness, and broaden the impact of students' thesis work. This project can thereby directly improve the quality of digital library research — particularly research supporting data infrastructure ecosystems across domains. The communication and presentation skills of these students, which are essential for their future careers, will also be strengthened. The best paper awards provide incentives to promote high-quality research in this field. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.