Research Data Management for Support Staff

Jonathan Rans & Kerry Miller, Digital Curation Centre

About this course

Short presentations with exercises and discussion

Five main sections Research data and RDM (30 mins) RDM at Surrey (15 mins) Skills exercise Data Management Planning (30 mins) Data sharing (30 mins) Breakout sessions –

Practical DMP support or Metadata and Documentation

Lunch @ 13:30

Introductions

Introduce yourself and offer a reflection on the questions:

What is your understanding of research?

Do you know anything about data management?

What do you want to find out today?

How do you see yourself supporting RDM?

Research data and RDM

So, what is meant by ‘research data’?

Anything & everything produced in the course of

research

Defining research data

Research data are collected, observed or created, for the purposes of analysis to produce and validate original research results

Both analogue and digital materials are 'data'

Lab notebooks and software may be classed as 'data'

Digital data can be: created in a digital form ('born digital') converted to a digital form (digitised)

Types of research data Instrument measurements

Experimental observations

Still images, video and audio

Text documents, spreadsheets, databases

Quantitative data (e.g. household survey data)

Survey results & interview transcripts

Simulation data, models & software

Slides, artefacts, specimens, samples

Sketches, diaries, lab notebooks …

What is data management?

“the active management and appraisal of data over the lifecycle of scholarly and scientific interest”

Digital Curation Centre

What is involved in research data management (RDM)?

Data Management Planning

Creating data

Documenting data

Accessing / using data

Storage and backup

Sharing data

Preserving data

Create

Document

Use

Store

Share

Preserve

What do research funders expect?

http://www.dcc.ac.uk/resources/policy-and-legal/overview-funders-data-policies

RDM principles and advice to share with researchers

See in particular:

UK Data Archive, Managing and sharing data: best practice for researchers http://data-archive.ac.uk/media/2894/managingsharing.pdf

n.b. Data Management Planning and Data Sharing are covered in separate sections

Data creation

Decide what data will be created and how - this should be communicated to the whole research team

Develop procedures for consistency and data quality

Choose appropriate software and formats - some are better for long-term preservation and reuse

Ensure consent forms, licences and partnership agreements don’t limit options to share data if desired

Documentation

Collect together all the information users would need to understand and reuse the data

Create metadata at the time - it’s hard to do later

Use standards where possible

Name, structure and version files clearly

Access and use

Restrict access to those who need to read/edit data

Consider the data security implications of where you store data and from which devices you access files

Choose appropriate methods to transfer / share data filestores & encrypted media rather than email & Dropbox

Storage and backup

Use managed services where possible e.g. Surrey shared drives rather than local or external hard drives

Ask the local IT team for advice

3… 2… 1… backup! at least 3 copies of a file on at least 2 different media with at least 1 offsite

Data selection

It’s not possible – or desirable - to keep everything.

Select based on:

What has to be kept e.g. data underlying publications

What legally must be destroyed

What can’t be recreated e.g. environmental recordings

What is potentially useful to others

The scientific or historical value

Guidance on selection and appraisal

http://www.dcc.ac.uk/resources/how-guides

http://www.nerc.ac.uk/research/sites/data/documents/data-value-checklist.pdf

https://intranet.birmingham.ac.uk/as/libraryservices/records/guidelines.aspx

Data preservation

Be aware of requirements to preserve data

Consult and work with experts in this field

Use available subject repositories, data centres and structured databases http://databib.org http://www.re3data.org/ http://www.zenodo.org

Skills

Defining institutional strategy and policy Implementing infrastructure Advising researchers Developing and delivering training Supporting data management planning Supporting data sharing ...

www.dcc.ac.uk/community/institutional-engagements

How are support staff engaging in RDM?

Library

IT

ResearchOffice

When does RDM engagement happen?

Responding to researcher requests Institutional support projects Fulfilling funder requirements FOI requests Etc.

Exercise: skills to support RDM Based on the activities we discussed earlier, consider who may

have relevant skills or expertise to share.You have 15 minutes

Activity The Library IT Research Enterprise Services

Other Research Support Services

Copyright

Data Citation

Information Literacy

Data Storage

Digital Preservation

Metadata

…

Conclusion

Acknowledgement

This Training has been adapted from the RDM for Librarians course created jointly by the DCC and the University of Northampton. Full details at:

http://www.dcc.ac.uk/training/rdm-librarians

Acknowledgement

Ideas and content have been taken from various courses:

Skills matrix, ADMIRe project, University of Nottinghamhttp://admire.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2012/09/18/rdmnottingham-training-event

DIY Training Kit for Librarians, University of Edinburghhttp://datalib.edina.ac.uk/mantra/libtraining.html

Managing your research data, Research360, University of Bathhttp://opus.bath.ac.uk/32296

RDMRose Lite, University of Sheffieldhttp://rdmrose.group.shef.ac.uk/?page_id=364

RoaDMaP training materials, University of Leedshttp://library.leeds.ac.uk/roadmap-project-outputs

SupportDM modules, University of East Londonhttp://www.uel.ac.uk/trad/outputs/resources