  Purpose - As national legislation, federated national services, institutional
policies and institutional research service organizations may differ, data
stewardship transpires differently in higher education institutions across the
world. This work seeks to elaborate the picture of different data stewardship
programs running in different institutional arrangements and research
environments. Design/methodology/approach - Drawing from autoethnography and
case study methods, this study described three distinct data stewardship
programs from Purdue University (United States), Delft Technical University
(Netherlands) and Aalto University (Finland). In addition, this work
investigated the institutional arrangements and national research environments
of the programs. The focus was on initiatives led by academic libraries or
similar services. Findings - This work demonstrates that data stewardship may
be understood differently within different national and institutional contexts.
The data stewardship programs differed in terms of roles, organization and
funding structures. Moreover, the mesh of policies and legislation,
organizational structures, and national infrastructures differed. Originality -
This work broadens the current literature on data stewardship by not only
providing detailed descriptions of three distinct data stewardship programs,
but also highlighting how research environments may affect their organization.
We argue that the knowledge of institutional and national arrangements is a
transversal requirement of data stewardship. Research limitations/implications
- The data stewardship programs and their contexts develop, and the
descriptions presented in this work should be considered as snapshots. Although
individual researchers and research groups may undertake data stewardship
activities, this study only investigated formalized services.
