Academic libraries have a critical role to play as data quality hubs on campus. There is an increased need to ensure data quality within ‘e-science’. Given academic libraries’ curation and preservation expertise, libraries are well suited to support the data quality process. Data quality measurements are discussed, including the fundamental elements of trust, authenticity, understandability, usability and integrity, and are applied to the Digital Curation Lifecycle model to demonstrate how these measures can be used to understand and evaluate data quality within the curatorial process. Opportunities for improvement and challenges are identified as areas that are fruitful for future research and exploration

Developing preservation processes for a trusted digital repository will require the integration of new methods, policies, standards, and technologies. Digital repositories should be able to preserve electronic materials for periods at least comparable to existing preservation methods. Modern computing technology in general is barely fifty years old and few of us have seen or used digital objects that are more than ten years old. While traditional preservation practices are comparatively well-developed, lack of experience and lack of consensus raise some questions about how we should proceed with digital-based preservation processes. Can we preserve a digital object for at least one-hundred years? Can we answer questions such as "Is this object the digital original"? or "How old is this digital object"? What does it mean to be a trusted repository of digital materials? A basic premise of this article is that there are many technologies available today that will help us build trust in a digital preservation process and that these technologies can be readily integrated into an operational digital preservation framework.

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This paper describes how the Pennsylvania State (Penn State) University Libraries and the university’s central information technology organization, Information Technology Services, are putting into practice key tenets of digital curation through the newly established Content Stewardship program, a joint strategic initiative to implement stewardship services for the university. First, we provide an account of the planning, preparation, and prototyping that informed the initial year of the program. Second, we report on the hiring of a Digital Collections Curator and a Digital Library Architect and how they are advancing the program by putting digital curation into practice, which includes the work of community building. Finally, we address the organizational context of curation in practice, in particular with respect to the challenges of starting and sustaining a stewardship services program for all of Penn State.