With that in mind, we thought this would be a good opportunity to highlight the various resources produced during the course of the project, explain how the work will continue, and tell you how you can keep up with the team.

WHAT WE FOUND

Like all the other projects in the JISC funded managing research data programme the first phase of the project focussed on gathering researchers’ requirements. We found that many researchers (i) organise their data in an ad hoc fashion, causing difficulties with retrieval and re‐use; (ii) store their data on all kinds of media, without always considering security and back‐up; (iii) are positive about data sharing in principle, though almost universally reluctant in practice; and (iv) believe back‐up is equivalent to preservation.

We also found that researchers require clearer, readily available guidance and practical support to manage their data effectively.  For the full scoping study report, please see: http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/preservation/incremental/documents/Incremental_Scoping_Report_170910.pdf

HOW WE RESPONDED:

The project  responded by raising awareness of existing guidance, support and services; providing easy to find, clear advice on new, central guidance web pages; repurposing existing guidance into more accessible formats; and, where necessary, created new resources.

For our data management guidance pages at our universities, please see:

http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/dataman/

http://www.glasgow.ac.uk/datamanagement/

The generic guidance from these pages has been put on an open wiki, so it’s easier for others to copy, add to and share:

http://wiki.arts.gla.ac.uk/dmg/index.php/Data_Management_Guidance_Contents

To raise awareness and help University staff and students address concerns and hone skills, we also provided practical training in the form of workshops and seminars, which addressed key data management topics.

Various resources were produced from these seminars, including a number of short videos in which researchers and data managers share their lessons:

http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/dataman/training.html#Interviews

http://www.gla.ac.uk/services/datamanagement/training/videos/

All our work is Creative Commons licensed (BY-NC-SA), so feel free to reuse. If you use any content, please drop us a line so we can measure impact

incremental@lib.cam.ac.uk

Our resources have also been deposited in JORUM and findable by searching for ‘JISC Incremental’.

SUSTAINING WHAT WE DEVELOPED:

The resources and relationships built through Incremental will require a certain amount of ongoing sustainability work.  At Cambridge, Incremental will be handing these responsibilities over to DSpace@Cambridge, which has been involved in the project from the start and sees research data management support as part of its remit.  The University Library and DSpace@Cambridge are also bringing together a few sources to fund a 12-18 month full-time post to further develop the work of Incremental and repository projects within the University.

At Glasgow, HATII will be taking responsibility to maintain Incremental resources in the short-term while the Digital Preservation Advisory Board will ensure they’re embedded into University services thereafter.  The staff who worked on Incremental will remain within HATII working on complementary projects, where the relationships that they have built with researchers and support services will continue to serve the University.

THANKYOU!

We’d like to take this opportunity to thank  JISC, our programme manager, Simon Hodson, and the other projects in the MRD programme, the DSpace@Cambridge team, the DataTrain project team, the CAiRO project, the Digital Curation Centre and the Digital Preservation Coalition; and to all those who followed our blog!

We would like to give special thanks to the researchers, students, and support service staff who took part in our interviews, and who contributed to our data management workshops and seminar series.  We are also particularly indebted to university services for helping to embed the resources.

KEEPING IN TOUCH:

Members of the research, preservation, data management, computing technology, and library communities who are interested in Incremental’s work, or who have questions about materials which we have produced can contact us at the post-project e-mail incremental@lib.cam.ac.uk (which goes to both Cambridge andGlasgow project staff and/or their predecessors).  We welcome feedback and recommendations for future development.

All five projects are producing discipline-specific training materials targeted at postgraduate researchers and PhD students.  The disciplines covered are:
(n.b. project name and contact person in brackets)

• Creative arts (CAiRO – Stephen Gray)
• Archaeology (DataTrain – Lindsay Lloyd-Smith)
• Anthropology (DataTrain – Irene Peano)
• Social science (MANTRA – Cuna Ekmekcioglu)
• Geoscience (MANTRA – Cuna)
• Psychology (DMTpsych – Richard Plant & MANTRA – Cuna)
• Public health (DATUM – Julie McLeod)

They’re delivering varied lengths and formats of course: a 5-day summer school (CAiRO); 4-6 fortnightly modules / lectures (DataTrain archaeology, DATUM and DMTpsych); a one day interactive workshop (DataTrain anthropology); and eight online learning units (MANTRA).

The projects are typically tying their provision in with existing postgraduate research methods courses.  MANTRA will become part of the University of Edinburgh’s Transkills programme.

Concerns were raised about the volume of information out there and the need to keep courses light and interesting (as data management is often considered to be dull!)  Projects are re-telling anecdotes and horror stories, as well as focusing on breakout exercises and discussion so learning is centred around the student experience.

Some highlights and take home messages from the presentations:

• CAiRO’s “Arts vs science: death-match” slide gave an insight into how arts research is different to science (and what implications this has on training)
• DataTrain courses are led by recent PhDs, as they’re more in tune with students (also felt to be a more sustainable model)
• DATUM project has put together a custom Google search of useful DM training sources
• DMTpsych found researchers preferred printed DMP guidance so they could read offline (in the bath!) and discuss ideas to decide what to include in plan
• MANTRA is licensing all content as attribution only for widest re-use – respect!
• Transferable skills are a key focus of DaMSSI.  They’re working with professional bodies to endorse career profiles, which show data management skills are useful in all walks of life.

All these project run until July 2011.  Find out more on the JISC MRD programme page

In the morning session, we heard from Dr Dee Heddon, artist and researcher; Dr Barry Smith, creator of the Live Art Archives and ex-Professor of Performance at Nottingham Trent; Stephen Gray of our fellow JISC Managing Research Data project, CAiRO (Curating Artistic Research Outputs); and theatre maker Adrian Howells.  We then had a panel discussion, followed by lunch.

In the afternoon, various members of University of Glasgow staff presented on support available to researchers in the field, and on points for researchers to remember when putting together a bid for funding.  Speakers included a University Resource Development Officer, an IT officer, a technical developer with funding bid experience and advice about the University’s Arts Lab and other available arts-related support.

Jackie Wickham of the Repositories Support Project was one of our delegates, who wrote a useful short blog post about the day from a delegate’s perspective – you can read this at http://rspproject.wordpress.com/2011/02/18/%E2%80%9Cmanaging-performance-data-and-documentation%E2%80%9D/.  Thanks, Jackie!

Our wonderful morning speakers very kindly agreed to give us a short interview about one aspect of data management pertinent to their talk.  Please visit the University of Glasgow data management Youtube channel to see these, and bookmark as there is more to come:  http://tiny.cc/GUdatamanagement

Our next discipline-specific event is on Monday 7 March at University of Glasgow, and focuses on archaeology – please visit http://hatii.wufoo.com/forms/managing-archaeology-data-and-documentation/ for more information and free registration!

On the 19th January 2011, the Incremental project and the Cambridge Digital Humanities Network ran a seminar on “Personal Data, Public Knowledge and Research Ethics”.

This seminar provided an opportunity for researchers, research co-ordinators, and data managers to discuss their experiences in finding practical ways of dealing with issues of consent, confidentiality, research design and relations with stakeholders.

We had two great speakers:

Dr Louise Corti from the UKDA, who talked about the support that the UKDA offers, as a repository for the social sciences and humanities; and the various aspects that researchers need to plan for when managing sensitive data, to ensure their data can be archived, shared and reused in the long term.

and Dr Libby Bishop from the UKDA/University of Leeds who talked about the Timescapes project, a qualitative longitudinal study which  explores how personal and family relationships develop and change over time.

Libby highlighted the challenges of managing longitudinal data, and the considerations, both ethical and practical, the team had, and are continuing to make, regarding data sharing and re-use of the data.

The Incremental project will be developing online resources from this seminar, including the creation of audio slideshows and Q&A videos with our speakers. We will be adding these resources to our data management guidance pages over the next few weeks, so please keep an eye out!

Free seminar: Managing Performance Data and Documentation

Register now at: http://tiny.cc/performancedata.

Thursday 17 February 2011, 10am-3pm (incl. lunch)

Venue: Turnbull Hall, Southpark Terrace, Southpark Avenue, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8LG.  A Google map for the venue is at: http://tinyurl.com/4le623e.

Cost: Free (yes, including lunch!)

Who it’s for: Researchers, performers, research-related staff and postgraduate students working in the live and performing arts.

Register now at: http://tiny.cc/performancedata.

Research in the live and performing arts produces interesting and varied types of documentation and data, including text, images, audio and video.  On Thursday 17 February, we will bring together researchers and performers working in the live and performing arts across the UK, to inspire and provide guidance for better management of these materials.

• In the morning session, a panel of researchers and artists from across the UK will share inspirational case studies about how they tackled their data management challenges.

• In the afternoon, experts from the University of Glasgow will provide guidance on varied data types used in the live and performing arts, and raise awareness of specific support available for researchers and students at the University.

Researchers, performers, postgraduate students and research-related staff working in the live and performing arts are all very welcome.  Registration is required, but free.

Please register as soon as possible to attend – registration closes at 12 noon on Monday 14th February.  For more information, a full programme and to register, please visit http://tiny.cc/performancedata.

Any questions?  Please email Laura Molloy, at: Laura.Molloy[at]Glasgow.ac.uk.

This free seminar will take place on Thu 17 February 2011, 10am – 3pm (including lunch) at the Turnbull Hall, Southpark Terrace, Southpark Avenue, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8LG.

This seminar is supported by the JISC Incremental project at the University of Glasgow, which aims to help researchers across all disciplines to manage and care for their research data and records.  Incremental ’s website is at: http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/preservation/incremental/glasgow.html.

Visit

http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/workshops/managing-your-research-data-digital-curation

for the goodies.

We plan to continue making as much material as possible available online for the benefit of those who can’t attend, and for those who did but would like to refresh their learning.

And feedback, as ever, is welcome!

This was my first  time to the International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC). The theme this year was ‘growing the curation community’, a theme very relevant to the aims of Incremental and I was keen to use this opportunity to, not only tell everyone about Incremental (my first victim had been the lady at immigration, when she asked why I was in the US…), but to hear what others are doing in the field both in the UK and US.

The programme promised some interesting speakers, and it didn’t disappoint. The two highlights for me were Chris Lintott, Astronomer and PI of Galaxy Zoo and MacKenzie Smith, Associate Director for Technology at MIT Libraries, who presented two different perspectives on digital curation.

Chris Lintott gave a fascinating talk describing a number of projects which use crowd sourcing,  such as Galaxy Zoo which gets the public to classify galaxies imaged as part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, and Old Weather which uses the public to digitise weather observations recorded in ship’s logbooks.

MacKenzie Smith talked about how digital curation tends to be viewed through a technology lense but an alternative view is seeing curation from an organisational perspective. She described the various layers of digital curation such as storage, management, linking, discovery, delivery and management of data, and that rather than just one institution or group, it is a combination of research groups: professional societies, data centres, libraries and archives, businesses, universities and funding agencies all interoperating in digital curation. The question is how and what role they, should they play in digital curation?

Presentations given by other JISC funded research data management or training projects such as James Wilson of Oxford, Robin Rice from Edinburgh and Wendy White of Southampton, were also of great interest.

On the Wednesday afternoon, we got to present our paper ‘Making sense: talking data management with researchers’. We were given a slot in the ‘Digital Curation Education’ parallel session and were able to describe our approach and plans for support and training researchers in data management.

It was interesting to hear the other presentations in this session, particularly as these served to highlight the different approaches that the UK and the US are taking in digital curation education.   Whilst the UK is focusing on researchers’ data management practice, the US are focusing very much on educating the library community in digital curation. One issue, two different approaches.

I think hearing both data creators and data managers talk about the challenges of data curation, the clear message that I took away from the conference, was that researchers clearly have the expertise in creating and using their data, but that they do not need to manage their data alone. Data curation is clearly a collaborative effort and other services such as IT, Libraries can play a key role too, by support ing researchers to make informed decisions.

• RDMF5: Economics of Applying and Sustaining Digital Curation and
• JISC MRD programme workshop Costs, Benefits and Sustainability.

Roles and responsibilities were a key theme. Is data management the concern of researchers, their institutions, funders or disciplinary data centres? At the RDMF, Jeff Haywood, Vice Principal for Knowledge Management at University of Edinburgh, described the institution as the place of last resort for preserving data. They hope to direct researchers to external data centres where possible but are concerned to keep a register of the data so they know where their assets are and can act to secure these if external services are under the threat of closure.

A breakout session at the RDMF on institutional solutions versus national data centres reached a similar conclusion. It isn’t a matter of choice – we have to live with a mixed landscape. It was argued there should be more services at local level: a sort of first step data management service. A series of handovers could then scale up to various levels as appropriate based on the nature of the data, the available infrastructure and the specific requirements of each case. Jeff’s argument holds well in this scenario – HEIs don’t need to provide a complete infrastructure, just add to existing provision where required and most importantly know what they own and where this is.

At the JISC workshop, Andrew Bush of KPMG addressed how costs can be built into research funding bids when there’s a gap in provision.  He recommended that data management support costs should be recovered through indirects, as this is apparently where research councils see them being placed. He advised not to class data management infrastructure as research facilities, as the cost of these should only be applied when the facility is used by a project – not on every bid – so you need to work at capacity. Also, as projects typically draw on data management infrastructure once finished, it’s better to include this as an indirect cost. It seems research funders are willing to meet data management costs but it’s quite an untested area so examples of how people have costed in support would be welcome.

One aspect where headway has been made is in defining some of those costs. The JISC MRD projects have been asked to identify researcher needs and pilot services to address these. At Leicester they’ve been investigating the provision of ‘good enough’ data centres, which provide robust but cheaper storage to researchers. The cost comparison was £400 per Tb per year versus the usual £1 a Gb a day on university SANs. Jonathan Tedds reported that the reception to this has been overwhelming, as researchers often struggle to manage their own storage and back-up efficiently. Comparable charges were noted by other JISC projects too.

More work is underway across the MRD programme on defining benefits and business models for sustainability. This will be presented at the International workshop in Birmingham in March 2011.

We have now received a bit of support and encouragement for our (a) FAQ-centric format, (b) light-weight level of detail with many ‘further reading’ links for adventurous souls, (c) categories of support/guidance, i.e. ‘managing your data’, ‘organising your data’, ‘accessing your data’, and ‘looking after your data’, and (d) topics.  So, with this first data point, I breathe a tentative sigh of relief. Wheh!

There were also some well-earned criticisms and helpful suggestions. Here are some of those:

• Practice what you preach! (We have instructed researchers to use open formats, and, where necessary, use PDF/A rather than PDF formats. But we had a lone Excel spreadsheet attachment on one of our pages. Hmm…)
• ‘Teaser’ text explaining links or categories must be precise and complete. (This may sound obvious, but it’s encouraging to see that our test user read and depended on this text, and we will give it some more thought).
• Including Pros & Cons is pretty much always helpful, especially when a question has no definitive answer that will serve all users best.
• ‘Return to top’ buttons are a site user’s best friend!
• Reminder: There are preferred formats for preserving file content in the long term, and preferred formats for preserving maximum file usability in the short/medium term, and the two aren’t always the same; we need to make sure that users understand this.

We’re continuing the work on the Cambridge and Glasgow websites, associated training resources, and data-management related workshops hosted at each institution.

As part of this process, we are hoping to send some of our draft resources your way soon, for your thoughts and appraisal. More on that soon– watch this space!

And, of course, as always, please send your thoughts on website usability and communication in our direction! Finally: have a safe, fun, and scalding-free fireworks weekend!

http://www.dpconline.org/newsroom/whats-new/651-whats-new-issue-31-november-2010#WhosWho31

One of the most difficult things is keeping responses short and pithy.  The more I thought about the questions, the more I wanted to say.  (The other most difficult thing is finding a photo I was prepared to put in the article!)

So, have a quick read and let us know what you thought.  Was I talking nonsense?  Let us know in the comments!