Going against Type?
RDM Metadata as Research Space
Mike Mertens, Deputy Director
@RLUK_Mike
www.rluk.ac.uk
Overview
• Reasons for undertaking the work
• Go from top-down to bottom-up
• Understanding impact of specific
investments in RDM
• Scoping future needs
• Data evolves with disciplines
• New staff competencies
• Why a data typology approach?
• Researcher-centred
• Librarian; goodbye mandates, hello
data
• From curated to automated metadata
• Refining the library’s role
Research libraries are and wanting
to provide services to researchers
to
meet
the
developing
requirements of funders and
secure research integrity but this
is not a static area
•
Data and liaison librarians need help in
building an understanding of:
•
The value attached by different groups of
researchers to data
•
The implications of these differences
with regard to how researchers work
•
Key challenge: huge variety of
different kinds of data in different
disciplines and sub-disciplines,
which also shift and change
•
Granular and specific discipline information needed for:
•
•
•
•
•
•
Managing data
Data curation
Discoverability
Sharing data
Developing staff skills
Cost & impact of support
•
Relatively more work has been done with the first four aspects in mind but two
of the outstanding issues for services is how to forecast cost and forward plan for
support skills.
Further RLUK Drivers:
•
•
•
•
•
Provide therefore more direct and immediately meaningful opportunities to build
networks with academic colleagues
The resource should go beyond simply listing data types but allow rapid and
precise orientation for those in support roles
• “!’m interested in Discipline X. What is the data environment there? Are
there any further sub-disciplines, is there crossover with other disciplines?”
Keep track of how researchers’ changing methodologies effect changes in data
types and formats used
The resource should be open to community editing and augmentation constantly evolving
Record links between established data repositories, metadata schema and
thesauri used by different disciplines and the data types the latter produce
“Research leaders should...adopt robust approaches for planning and costing data
management and sharing plans”
RLUK felt that there was a role for libraries here in providing the information that would go into
such costings as well as generally support data librarians
Method:
•
A series of focus groups with researchers in different disciplines to test and refine
the initial typology based on desk research, and to examine and identify in such
issues as:
• The volumes and proportions of the different kinds of data they gather and
create
• The stages in the research process at which different kinds of data are
produced, and how they are handled
• The value they attach to data of different kinds, both during the research
process and beyond any particular project
• Attitudes towards data sharing and openness for different kinds of data.
The Background Work: the Dimensions of Data Typology:
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•
•
•
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•
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Experimental, observational, survey, models, simulations etc.
Raw or analysed (and to what degree)
Numerical, text, audio, image etc
Contextual data relating to provenance, machine and sensor settings etc.
Software, formats and standards
Ethical and legal issues
Data ownership
http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/cjg/rluk/
“The Organization Profile Document is a way for an organization to make
'expected' open data sources/API discoverable. You can guess that a
university has a certain things, like a publications database, a news RSS feed
etc. It's creating a formal way to discover those so we don't have to depend on
curated catalogues (probably not a safe thing to say to a Librarian!). I strongly
believe that we need to encourage the use of the Web as a complement to
catalogues.”
With thanks to:
John MacColl, Chair, RLUK and University Librarian & Director of Library Services, St Andrews
University
Stéphane Goldstein, Research Information Network
Chris Gutteridge, Technical Administrator, UK Research Data Community Wiki, University of
Southampton
John Kaye, Senior Jisc Co-Design Manager
Images:
“Here's The Thing...Amagoop”, JD Hancock
https://www.flickr.com/photos/jdhancock/16258886941/
“How to get the most out of your data, and why it matters, UCL,
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/reward/reward-events-publication/nov_workshop.png
Gout: monosodium urate crystals in joint fluid, Ed Uthman,
https://www.flickr.com/photos/euthman/501118522
Hubble Probes Comet 103P/Hartley 2 in Preparation for DIXI flyby, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center,
https://www.flickr.com/photos/gsfc/5056694893
Robot army: They're coming to getcha, Peyri Herrera,
https://www.flickr.com/photos/peyri/10207629/
Thanks! Questions?