Data curation is important to anyone who uses data or will be affected by the use of data, so everyone, really! The difficult part is to make the concept accessible and to convey the importance to those not working in a data curation setting. In academic circles the idea that a researcher’s valuable contribution to the field could be unreadable in as little as ten years makes an impression. Many of the activities that curators can use to ensure the preservation of data are not controversial, such as storing data in standard formats and creating preservation metadata. 