Ken Miller
Associate Director - Head of Information Development, Programming and eSocial Science - UK Data Archive
I'm presently involved in the following projects:StORe - Source-to-Output Repositories.
An initiative to begin the process of adding significant value to the intellectual
products of academic research, and the new knowledge established as a consequence
of it, through enabling the repositories of published reports and papers to interact
directly with the repositories of source data from which they are derived.
e-Infrastructure for the Social Sciences (NCeSS).
This project will begin to build an e-Infrastructure on the UK National Grid Service
(NGS) to provide integrated access to a variety of resources for social science
research, including datasets, tools, services and easy-to-use user environments. In so
doing, it will deliver important benefits for UK e-Social Science.
I have also been involve in EU collaborative projects through CESSDA (Council for
European Social Science Data Archives)
LIMBER (Language Independent Metadata Browsing of European Resources) which
created a multilingual user interface to the data stored in social science archives
across Europe.
MADIERA (Multilingual Access to Data Infrastructures of the European Research
Area) which developed an effective infrastructure for the European social science
community by integrating data with other tools, resources and products of the
research process.
This work is hoped to be developed through a targeted FP7 call to research
infrastructures identified in the European Strategy Forum on Research
Infrastructures (ESFRI) roadmap.
I have also entered a proposal within the JISC Capital Programme for Repositories
and Preservation under the Tools and Innovation strand to investigate the
combination and comparison of controlled vocabulary and folksonomy approaches to
semantic interoperability.
The UK Data Archive (UKDA) is an internationally-renowned centre of expertise in
data acquisition, preservation, dissemination and promotion; and is curator of the
largest collection of digital data in the social sciences and humanities in the UK. The
UKDA provides resource discovery and support for secondary use of quantitative and
qualitative data in research, teaching and learning as a lead partner of the Economic
and Social Data Service.
Stakeholders in UKDA projects are usually the project sponsor, UKDA, the research
community, post graduate, undergraduate and FE students, other Data Archives and
repositories, the library community, data producers, Research Councils and the
general public.
Stakeholders who are partners in the project are involved in the preparation phase to
set overall aims and objectives and to develop work packages which contain the
outcomes they want. Available expertise is also reviewed and allocated in this phase.
A dedicated project manager is essential in collaborative projects.
At the start of the project all these stakeholders meet to set codes of practice, quality
assurance standards and to review the dependencies and risks within the overall
project.
The first phase of the project is usually some from of User Analysis which can
include one or more of the following: analysis of previously conducted user surveys, a
fresh user survey of members from all stakeholder groups; one-to-one interviews with
selected experts from each stakeholder group or a scene-setting workshop with
selected attendees from all stakeholder groups.
From the user analysis one or more of the following is produced: A survey report, a
business analysis, a functional specification and a technical specification. These are
reviewed by the internal project board, again selected from expects from the
stakeholder groups and in certain circumstances can also be peer-reviewed by external
experts.
An early prototype of any new software or service is developed and an evaluation
exercise or workshop held to get early feedback into the development process and to
help clarify the user requirements from all stakeholder groups.
A cyclic development then occurs with regular internal reviews with feedback on the
product; until a Beta version is produced. There will then be a full evaluation
workshop, inviting attendees from the previously held workshops.
Final refinements after this workshop produce a candidate release version of the
software or service, on which a final evaluation report is then written. Project
development usually stops there. Final upgrade to a working release usually occurs
after the project has ended.
Virtually all UKDA projects are service orientated in that the overall objective is to
improve existing systems, create new ones or open up these services to a new user
base.