The honor of best peer-reviewed paper at the Sixth Annual International Digital Curation Conference was awarded to Syracuse University School of Information Studies (iSchool) doctoral students Youngseek Kim and Ben Addom, led by iSchool Associate Dean for Research and Doctoral Studies Jeffrey Stanton.

The paper examined the roles and competencies of an emerging group of information professionals in the field of eScience who specifically work with large-scale researchers to manage information and data, serving a new area of librarianship.

Kim and Addom, who were directed by the lead on the project Stanton, worked with eScience information professionals at the C.I. Facilitators Project to determine the roles and responsibilities of those already working within eScience in order to distinguish the careers of those within eScience from other fields. The researchers hope to help create an academic program for those looking to get involved with careers in eScience information management.

“I felt that the framework for this particular project was valuable in the insights it provided,” said Sheila Corral, professor of Librarianship and Information Management at the University of Sheffield. “It provides a very useful starting point for a number of other studies that could be conducted to follow up this one and explore similar issues with different sets of people involved in working in the data management arena.”

The UK Digital Curation Centre hosted the IDCC in Chicago from December 6-8 2010, partnering with the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Coalition for Networked Information. The theme of this year’s conference was “Growth and Practice: Growing the curation community through the decade.”