The poster gives an overview of the major strands of work in the Research360 project (Roadmap & Business Case, RDM Policy & Policy Guidelines, RDM Website & Researcher Support, RDM Training Workshops). It describes the outcomes in each area, along with the continuing work which will support and further develop these outcomes going forward.

• Download the poster

We’ve started using the template as part of our main data management workshop for PGRs, and we’ve also had a group of Doctoral Training Centre students complete DMPs using it as well. Feedback from both groups has been very positive.

You can access both documents from our institutional repository:

• Data Management Plan for Postgraduate Researchers
• Data Management Planning Guidance for Postgraduate Researchers

On Monday morning, we ran a workshop, jointly with Hannah Lloyd-Jones from Open Exeter, entitled “Designing Data Management Training Resources: Tools for the provision of interactive research data management workshops“. This offered participants the opportunity to learn more about the way we run our face-to-face data management training with staff and students, and to experience first-hand some of the interactive exercises we use.

These included Open Exeter’s “Research Data Dating” exercise, in which two concentric circles of participants have 3 minutes to describe their research data to each other before moving on to the next person. I demonstrated how we use “clickers” (audience response systems) to survey our students during face-to-face workshops, and we also had a discussion of the pros and cons of the data management plan (DMP) templates that we’ve used with students.

For more info, take a look at Marieke Guy’s blog post, IDCC13: Exemplar RDM Training Exercises and Jill Evans’s summary of tweets from the workshop. For those who are interested, we used PollEverywhere, a website which permits voting on questions via SMS or the web on a smartphone or laptop.

Update: You can now download Hannah’s slides: Designing Data Management Training Resources: IDCC 2013 Workshop

Cathy Pink presented a practice paper entitled “Meeting the Data Management Compliance Challenge: Funder Expectations and Institutional Reality“. The paper drew together lessons learnt by the Research360 project, based on its experience in meeting the varied data management needs of both an institution and its external stakeholders. The text of Cathy’s paper will be available online soon.

Liz Lyon facilitated the “What is a data scientist?” symposium, an interactive panel discussion around roles and skills required to cope with the growing importance of data in scholarship. See Marieke’s blog post, “IDCC13: What’s in a name? The ‘data scientist’ symposium” for more details.

Finally, we also presented a poster, “Creating an Online Training Module on RDM“, about the process of developing our research data management e-learning module for postgraduate students. The poster was designed and written by our colleague Marieke Guy from UKOLN, and I gave a “minute madness” presentation summarising it as well.

There is also a searchable archive of tweets with the #idcc13 hashtag.

read more

Our slides and poster from the progress workshop are now available through our institutional repository:

• Presentation — RDM Training for Students and Staff: Progress & Observations (Jez Cope)
• Presentation — University of Bath Roadmap for EPSRC (Cathy Pink)
• Poster — Research360 Progress Update (Jez Cope & Cathy Pink)

We hope that this resource will be useful for researchers and support staff both within and beyond the University.

They will continue to be added to and updated as time goes on, particularly over the next 6 months or so as we finalise the University’s policy on research data.

For those who are interested in such things, we’ve taken a conscious decision to keep the content as brief as possible and signpost visitors to good advice held elsewhere, by organisations such as the Digital Curation Centre.

There are two ways into the content:

• The left-hand navigation bar, which appears on each page, is organised logically into categories. In addition, the navigation bar also includes an email link to our main point of contact for research data, to encourage a) people to seek personalised advice; and b) feedback to improve the site further.
• The home page is intended to signpost useful resources to help with particular activities and situations, broadly divided into stages of the research lifecycle.

Many of the pages have boxouts with crosslinks pointing to other areas of the site with related content.

Any feedback would be most welcome: contact me at j.cope@bath.ac.uk.

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There were lots of presentations, so I’ve limited this review to my top 3 highlights.

read more

DCC staff were at the IFLA World Library and Information Congress last week. The conference was vast, welcoming over 4,200 librarians to Helsinki and addressing all manner of library concerns. The programme included a number of sessions relevant to data management on the days we attended. Highlights are provided below.

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The session was structured similarly to our last workshop, though without the extended hands-on section on data management planning. The loss of this section was down to time pressures (we had an hour less this time).

We started by showing a series of statements about research data management, such as "I am satisfied that my data is safe", and asking the participants to rate (anonymously using clickers) how much they agreed or disagreed with each statement. The answers gave us an opportunity to start some discussions and get a picture of what the current level of knowledge was.

Cathy then gave a more formal presentation (slides available here) covering the major aspects of research data management with me pitching in on more technical bits.

We finished up by revisiting the statements from the start of the session to see how opinions had changed, and handing out some leaflets from the DCC.

Feedback

Feedback from the attendees was overwhelmingly positive:

• 95% of respondents were satisfied with the course;
• 91% would recommend the course to others;
• 95% found it relevant to their needs.

Some interesting answers to the question "What was most useful?" include:

• "Need to plan for good management"
• "Reminding me of how easy it would be to lose my data and how I should look after it better"
• "Notes on data cycle, info on making data public"
• "Knowing where to go for help, helping to focus my data management plan"

Actions that participants said they would take as a result of the workshop fell mostly into two categories:

• "Prepare a management plan"; and
• "Back up my data"

Although we don’t know whether anyone carried out their actions, this was very encouraging to read, as our message had clearly got through.

Room for improvement

One participant felt that there was a bias towards science. This is understandable, since both Cathy and I have science backgrounds, and science/engineering is the main focus of Research360, but we’ll see what we can do to rectify this.

Another comment referred to "lack of more contemporary ways of storing data, e.g. Dropbox". We’d intentionally steered clear of Dropbox, as the official University stance on cloud storage is still being decided. Whatever that decision turns out to be, we’ll need to deal with Dropbox and other cloud tools.

There was a request for more group discussion, and I think this would be a valuable addition, so we’ll try to make the next session a bit more interactive. Group discussions could usefully focus on differences and similarities between disciplines, for example, as I think people in different subjects would have quite a lot of pre-existing knowledge that they could share.

I’d also like to give the participants something concrete to do after they’ve left the workshop. This could be something specific like "write a data management plan", but I think there would be more likelihood of these actions being carried out if the participants take some ownership. One way to achieve this would be to wrap up the session with an action-planning section and ask each student to define their own data management goal or goals.

Reaching out to staff

Although the session was also open to research staff, only one staff member registered to attend and in the end they didn’t turn up.

Helping busy research staff to gain new skills is a difficult task. They have many demands on their time, pulling in many different directions, and many already work far more than their contracted hours.

We aim to deal with this in a number of ways:

• Providing an e-learning module which researchers can study in their own time at their own pace;
• Developing a website with concise and practical guidance, structured around specific tasks and situations;
• Reaching out in a variety of different ways, including:
  • A single point of contact email address for all inquiries relating to research data — this is tied into the university request tracker system, so an individual requests can be passed on to the team best placed to help;
  • Presentations to Deans and Heads of Department by Professor Matthew Davidson, chair of the Research Data Steering Group and Associate Dean (Research) for the Faculty of Science, as well as an active researcher himself;

We’re also in discussions with the professional services around the University to understand (and help them understand) how research data management fits into their roles and how we can provide the support they need.

• View slides from this session