  This paper presents a multifarious examination of natural resources and
environmental scientists' adventures navigating the policy change towards open
access and cultural shift in data management, sharing, and reuse. Situated in
the institutional context of Virginia Tech, a focus group and multiple
individual interviews were conducted exploring the domain scientists'
all-around experiences, performances, and perspectives on their collection,
adoption, integration, preservation, and management of data. The results reveal
the scientists' struggles, concerns, and barriers encountered, as well as their
shared values, beliefs, passions, and aspirations when working with data. Based
on these findings, this study provides suggestions on data modeling and
knowledge representation strategies to support the long-term viability,
stewardship, accessibility, and sustainability of scientific data. It also
discusses the art of curation as creative scholarship and new opportunities for
data librarians and information professionals to mobilize the data revolution.
