The Illinois Data Purchase Program: Journey's End / New Horizons

The Data Purchase Program (DPP) at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) was one of the earliest formalized programs for data collection development based on requests from researchers. Beginning in 2011, the DPP successfully made targeted acquisitions of numerical and geospatial datasets on behalf of UIUC graduate students and faculty. However, each new dataset acquisition presented its own unique challenges, and a variety of approaches for storage, discovery, and access (in accord with vendor requirements) were tested and implemented with mixed success. In addition, over the eleven years of the program, researchers' expectations regarding the DPP's budget, speed, and ongoing support began to exceed the DPP's scope, while data vendors became more sophisticated in their offerings and options. Waves of challenges--in acquiring data our researchers wanted, in maintaining the collection we already had, and in maintaining the personnel needed to support the collection--overwhelmed the DPP, and the program was discontinued in 2022. This poster will discuss the territories the DPP explored, the lessons learned, and how those lessons can inform future expeditions in data collection development, storage, discovery and access at Illinois and beyond.