Acting in the Best Interest of the Other: An Ethics of Care in Digital Curation

This study explores how digital repositories approach qualitative research data curation through an ethics of care lens, particularly when handling data containing identifiable participants. Through 44 semi-structured interviews with educational researchers and teacher-educators who produce and reuse video records of practice (VROP), the research examines perceptions of care in repository practices and the relationships between repositories and their designated communities. Our findings indicate that (1) data producers and reusers in education view repositories as sites of care, (2) they view data curation as a form of care, and (3) they expect repositories to act in the best interest of the participants represented in research data, thereby enacting an ethics of care. Interviewees emphasized that repositories must extend beyond technical compliance to embrace ethical commitments that preserve participant dignity throughout the data lifecycle. They sought repositories whose values aligned with their own ethics of care, particularly regarding protection of vulnerable populations. The study identifies care as both a relational process that develops over time and a framework that should inform repository policies from data selection through access decisions. These findings extend current understanding of designated communities beyond consumers of data to include groups whose ethical frameworks should inform repository practices, with implications for qualitative data repositories containing data with identifiable participants.