Librarians who want to engage with researchers around long-term data management often use interviews to gather information about the data the researchers hold. Interviews help librarians understand the scope and scale of the data to be preserved, the data formats, access restrictions, if any, and any other information that could render the data intelligible to other researchers.

Practices vary across disciplines, but there is a core set of questions that generally needs to be addressed, such as:

• Who owns the data?
• Why was the data gathered or created?
• Where is the data housed?
• Who can access the data?
• How can the data be used?

and so on. Accordingly, it makes sense to develop a template for interviewing to ensure vital questons are not omitted.

The Purdue University Libraries and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois and Urbana-Champaign have developed a Data Curation Profiles Toolkit for use by librarians.

The Toolkit comprises four documents:

• A User Guide
• An Interviewer's Manual
• An Interview Worksheet
• A Template

Users who register can download the four documents as Word files.