The Data Conservancy –which is a National Science Foundation funded Datanet project with a diverse array of partners – embraces a shared vision: data curation is not an end, but rather a means to collect, organize, validate, and preserve data to address grand research challenges that face society. Key to the data conservancy approach is information science research on the data practices of the science domains. Three teams are conducting social studies of individual science domains. Prof. Carole Palmer of the University of Illinois will report on their comparative studies of multiple biosciences domains. Prof. Christine Borgman of the University of California, Los Angeles, will report on their studies of astronomers. We are in the first year of the project, and will focus on our research questions, methods, and what we hope to learn from this 5-year project. http://www.ibi.hu-berlin.de/institut/veranstaltungen/bbk/bbk-material/abstracts/