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
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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
Create
Preserve
Document
Share
Use
 Accessing / using data
 Storage and backup
 Sharing data
 Preserving data
Store
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
n.b. Data Management Planning and Data Sharing are
covered in separate sections
See in particular:
UK Data Archive, Managing and sharing data: best practice for researchers
http://data-archive.ac.uk/media/2894/managingsharing.pdf
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
https://intranet.birmingham.ac.uk/as/libraryservices/records/guidelines.aspx
http://www.nerc.ac.uk/research/sites/data/documents/data-value-checklist.pdf
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
How are support staff engaging in RDM?
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Defining institutional strategy and policy
Implementing infrastructure
Advising researchers
Developing and delivering training
Supporting data management planning
Supporting data sharing
...
Research
Office
www.dcc.ac.uk/community/institutional-engagements
Library
IT
When does RDM engagement happen?
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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
Copyright
Data Citation
Information Literacy
Data Storage
Digital Preservation
Metadata
…
The Library
IT
Research
Enterprise Services
Other Research
Support Services
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 Nottingham
http://admire.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2012/09/18/rdmnottingham-training-event
 DIY Training Kit for Librarians, University of Edinburgh
http://datalib.edina.ac.uk/mantra/libtraining.html
 Managing your research data, Research360, University of Bath
http://opus.bath.ac.uk/32296
 RDMRose Lite, University of Sheffield
http://rdmrose.group.shef.ac.uk/?page_id=364
 RoaDMaP training materials, University of Leeds
http://library.leeds.ac.uk/roadmap-project-outputs
 SupportDM modules, University of East London
http://www.uel.ac.uk/trad/outputs/resources