What Does a Data Curator Do?

Key takeaways

A data curator manages data through its lifecycle from creation to deletion, ensuring it’s accessible, retrievable, high-quality, and available.

• The three main stages of data curation are identifying, cleaning, and transforming data.

• Data curators need a combination of technical and workplace skills, including data enrichment, data management, programming, attention to detail, communication, and collaboration.

• You can still pursue a career in data curation even if you already hold a bachelor’s degree in a different subject, such as social sciences or engineering, because it’s possible to shift into this field by earning a certificate or obtaining a master’s degree.

Discover more about careers as a data curator, the benefits of data curation, the type of education required, and the average annual data curator salary. If you’re ready to begin developing your skill set related to this field, enroll in the Google Data Analytics Professional Certificate. In as little as six months, you can learn about data cleansing, Google Sheets, file management, data ethics, and more.

What is data curation?

Data curation is the process of actively managing data throughout its entire lifecycle, from creation to deletion. This system ensures the preservation of the data in a way that makes it accessible and easily retrievable for those who want to use it. Data curation tends to involve digital and generated data. However, data curation isn’t only about preserving the data itself but also about the methods the data curator uses to gather the data and the purpose behind the data. These data sets are typically preserved for future analytical purposes to increase your understanding of a certain subject. If you own a business, this organized information can assist you in making an important decision.

What are the 3 main stages of data curation?

The three main stages of data curation are identifying, cleaning, and transforming data. In the identification stage, you’ll search for data sets that contain useful information. Then, you’ll clean data, looking for anomalies, typos, or missing values. Finally, you’ll transform the data by converting it into a format that allows other team members to properly analyze it.

What is a data curator?

If you choose to work as a data curator, you would most likely be responsible for maintaining, organizing, and improving the accessibility of an organization’s data. Typically, in this role, you would be responsible for gathering newly created data and working with previously created data. Like museum curators or librarians, a data curator not only collects data for storage but also seeks to categorize and explain it. Providing context and accurate descriptions makes the data easier to access. It also helps those who want to utilize the data, such as analysts or researchers, to interact with it properly.

Furthermore, the worldwide appetite for data generates massive amounts of money, as Grand View Research projects the global big data market to grow at a CAGR of 14.9 percent over the next several years, exceeding $1.4 trillion by 2035 [1]. Since a variety of industries, such as health care, laboratories, colleges, and businesses, use data curation, a career in this field might provide you with many job opportunities from which to choose.

Why is data curation important?

Data curation is important because, in this role, you could help to add value to data sets through accurate organization and descriptive metadata. Also, rather than presenting information in a vacuum, data curation adds context. It’s contextualized to make it accessible to the right audiences. Data curation introduces a formal structure to the immense volumes of data created by organizations, which means that data scientists working at a company, for example, could more easily access the information for analytical purposes. Data curation also makes data retrievable and accessible while maintaining its quality and preserving its ability to be reused.

Read more: AI Tools to Improve Data Quality (and How to Use Them)

What does a data curator do?

Generally, a data curator’s job is to manage data as it travels through its lifecycle from creation to deletion. As the curator, you would probably focus on ensuring the data is accessible, retrievable, high-quality, and available within context.

Tasks and responsibilities to curate data

The specific tasks and responsibilities of a data curator may vary based on the industry and organization you work for, but some typical tasks and responsibilities include:

• Review and inventory data sets

• Work with professionals across departments to gather and dispense data

• Examine data for quality and determine if it has further use

• Accurately cite data sets to give proper credit

• Clean data to maintain its quality and value

• Ensure long-term usability of data through proper preservation methods

• Accurately track curation processes using a copy while preserving raw data

Data curator skills

Data curators typically need skills to identify, describe, sort, and preserve data sets. Some examples of these skills include:

Technical skills

• Research skills

• Data enrichment (adding context and connecting data to related sources)

• Data management (verifying, naming, cleaning, and converting data)

• Data description (using vocabulary and a set of standards to create metadata)

• Deposit or publish (implementing a method for storing data properly)

• Apply analytical skills to existing research

• Programming knowledge

• Strong grasp of data modeling

Workplace skills

• Attention to detail

• Communication skills for sharing information effectively in presentations

• Ability to collaborate with other data professionals as well as stakeholders

Data curator salary and job outlook

Like other curator roles, data curators are in high demand and are seeing a lot of growth in several industries such as health care, business, scientific research, and artistic expression. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the area of the economy where data curators operate is expected to grow 34 percent from 2024 to 2034, which is much faster than average [2]. If you’re considering this career, the median total pay for a data curator is $76,000 [3]. This figure includes base salary and additional pay, which may represent profit-sharing, commissions, bonuses, or other compensation.

Data curator jobs: Career path

Since “data curator” is a relatively new career, you can approach this job from several angles. A survey of people in this position found they held bachelor’s degrees in humanities, social sciences, sciences, and engineering. Therefore, even if you began your career in one direction, you can shift into this field by earning a certificate or obtaining a master’s degree. 

For example, you might consider a certificate in digital curation from the University of North Texas, or you can pursue a master’s degree in library science with a focus on data curation from the University of Washington. If you prefer to earn a degree online, the University of North Carolina offers a master’s in digital curation and management. Finally, maybe you are about to begin your undergraduate degree and believe data curation is your field. In this case, you might consider earning a bachelor’s in information science because it deals with the creation of information and its organization, management, storage, collection, and application. Additionally, this degree combines aspects of computer science, library science, and information management, which seem to connect to the job description of a data curator.

After obtaining your bachelor’s degree or maybe even your master’s, you can begin searching for a position working as a data curator. Fortunately, because this skill set is applicable across many forms of data, you can choose from various industries to begin your career, such as health care, scientific research, finance, and the public sector, to name a few. 

Additional data curation education and training 

Even after you’ve begun working in this field, you might consider acquiring certificates to help further your knowledge base and expand your abilities. Many universities are offering certificates in this specialty to account for the lack of data curators in this growing profession. 

Discover more about data skills with our free resources

Subscribe to Career Chat on LinkedIn to get timely updates on popular skills, tools, and credentials related to jobs in data. Build or refresh your skills in this field with our other free resources:

• Watch on YouTube: What Is Data Wrangling? The Key to Clean Data

• Read our Career Chat issue: 7 Data Analytics Certificates to Know

• Bookmark for future study: Data Analysis Terms & Definitions

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