Albert R. Mann Library and the Cornell Language Acquisition Laboratory (CLAL) are working to plan for a new model of collaboration between research laboratories and academic libraries to provide for effective description, discovery, and sharing of diverse types of research data across institutional and disciplinary boundaries while respecting individual laboratories' needs for local management of their repositories and access policies.

Through a Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) from the NSF, we are planning an infrastructure for preservation, discovery, and sharing of research data. The overall goal is for academic libraries to be able to provide a suite of services to maximize the effectiveness of a research laboratory's investment in preservation and description of data. Through documented best practices, and software tools based on a hierarchical interrelation of metadata through library-developed administrative ontologies, we seek to ensure that data described in ways which most accurately reflect their original research environments will be discoverable and reusable by others across related disciplines.