Metadata emerged as the underlying theme in this session on Data Repositories, Portals and Catalogues at the JISC MRD Achievements, Challenges and Recommendations workshop held in Birmingham on 25-26 March 2013. Programme

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Cathy’s slides are now available for download from our institutional repository:

• Presentation — Working with commercial partners (Cathy Pink)

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)

She gave us an overview of e-infrastructure and data management in Australia, including particular data management projects at Melbourne, and finished off with a mention of the DMVitals project from the University of Virginia, which she visited recently as part of her “world tour”.

Australian universities seem to have very strong support for data management and e-research in general. There is a series of national roadmaps to support e-research and, crucially, these are backed by government funding for the development and maintenance of national infrastructure. This is expanding all the time: most recently, digitisation was recognised as being eligible for this infrastructure funding.

NeCTAR is a national e-research infrastructure service, funded by the Australian Government and led by the University of Melbourne. It runs integrated e-research services, including a research cloud and a network of virtual laboratories, which are made available to institutions across Australia. For example, the University of Sydney has been using the LabTrove software for e-lab notebooks. Initially, the University of Southampton (where the software originated) provided hosting, but this service has now been moved to NeCTAR’s infrastructure, making it available to many other Australian universities.

AURIN (Australian Urban Research Infrastructure Network) provides e-infrastructure for urban research. It provides, amongst other things, federated access to data held by members in the network, and has done a great job of showing that old data can continue to be useful.

ANDS (Australian National Data Service) is a collaboration between Monash University, Australian National University and CSIRO to support data management across Australia. Over the last few years, they’ve implemented a national data register, Research Data Australia (RDA) which has made data from all of the country’s major institutions discoverable through a single web interface.

At Melbourne itself, they have had two recent data management successes. The first is Seeding the Commons, part of a national programme supported by ANDS to publish large numbers of existing nationally-relevant datasets and make them available through Research Data Australia. As a result of this project, the University of Melbourne is responsible for, in Anna’s words, “by far the greatest number of records submitted to Research Data Australia by a single institution.”

The second initiative is a series of data capture projects. These have piloted improvements to data management practices in ongoing research projects in order to publish information about valuable collections of data being created. Researchers submit data to an institutional register, which then feeds into RDA to maximise discoverability. This architecture enables the University of Melbourne to retain primary ownership of the records, and avoids the need for researchers to submit information directly to RDA.

Based on these successes they are now engaged in Doing Data Better, a project to roll out data management to the whole institution. They’ve created a policy and had it passed by the university, and each department has to write local rules setting out how they will implement the university-wide policy. That policy, along with other resources they’ve developed for researchers, is available on the project website.

Finally, Anna told us about DMVitals, an assessment tool being developed by the University of Virginia to identify strengths and weaknesses in individual researchers’ data management practice. The aim of this isn’t to “tell off” academics who are “doing it wrong”, but to create a report with a data management action plan to suggest practical steps researchers can take to improve. The tool is partially automated, with a scorecard that takes the answers to a series of yes/no questions and uses a weighted algorithm to create the report. I saw an early version of this tool being demonstrated at IDCC last year and I look forward to seeing it developed further.

Data Management at Oxford

Paul Jeffreys, director of IT, University of Oxford, gave an introduction to current data management practice at the University of Oxford. Currently activities in Oxford are varied and rarely co-ordinated. Although there is a RDM portal comprising of a research skills toolkit, RDM checklist, a University statement on research data management (based on the University of Edinburgh’s ’10 commandments’) and a training programme in place there are many people/areas they are failing to meet. One area for concern is non-funded research (i.e. people for whom their research is their life’s work). It remains very tricky to build in generic support and activities need to be flexible.

Introduction to DataFlow

DataFlow was introduced by David Shotton, the DataFlow PI. DataFlow is a collaborative project led by the University of Oxford. It is a two-tier data management infrastructure that allows users to manage and store research data. The project builds on a prototype developed in the JISC-funded ADMIRAL project.

The first tier, called DataStage, is a file store which can be accessed through private network drives or the web. Users can upload research data files and the service is backed up nightly. DataStage is likely to be used by single research groups and deployment can be on a local server or on an institutional or commercial cloud. There is optional integration with DropBox and other Web services.

The second tier is DataBank, which, through a web submission interface, allows users to select and package files for publication. Files are accompanied by a simple metadata and contain an RDF manifest, which is then displayed as linked open data. They are packaged using the BagIt service. Databank is a scalable data repository where data packages are published and released under a CCZero licence, though users can chose to keep data private or add an optional embargo period.

DataFlow is now at beta release v0.1. The DataFlow team are keen to build a user community and have lots of processes in place allowing users to comment on developments.

Introduction to ViDaaS

James Wilson, ViDaaS project manager introduced us to ViDaaS. Virtual Infrastructure with Database as a Service (ViDaaS) comprises of two separate elements. DaaS is a web based system that enables researchers to quickly and intuitively build an online database from scratch, or import an existing database. The virtual infrastructure (VI) is an infrastructure which enables the DaaS to function within a cloud computing environment, it is known as the ORDS service – Online research database service. It builds on ideas developed in the JISC-funded sudamih projects The ViDaaS service currently has three business models:

• £600 per year for a standard project (25gb)
• £2000 per year for large project (100gb)
• Later option for public cloud for hosting

ViDaaS is officially launching this summer.

Further details on interoperability between ViDaaS are contained within the Data Management Rollout at Oxford (DaMaRO) Project.

Both services are seen as being ‘sheer curation’. This is an approach to digital curation where curation activities are quietly integrated into the normal work flow of those creating and managing data and other digital assets. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_curation#Sheer_curation

So Why Use these Services?

Many of the other speakers from the day attempted to convince us of why we should use these services. It seems that despite the efforts of many, including the DCC data curation is often seen as a ‘fringe activity’. There are negligible rewards for creating metadata and there is a noticeable skills barriers in metadata– researchers have raw data – institutions have repositories that are empty. The principle of ‘sheer curation’ – allow tools to work with you rather than against you. It is an approach to digital curation where curation activities are quietly integrated into the normal work flow of those creating and managing data and other digital assets. Both DataFlow and ViDaaS offer integration with simple workflows and immediate benefits.

Use of shared infrastructure services is supported by JISC. They offer potential cost savings, transferability and reuse of tools.

The key for getting people to use the services lies in getting buyin from users and allowing flexibility. As user Chris Holland explained “we are inherently creative people are going to do things in our own way”. There is a need to make services flexible and intuitive as no system can be all things to all researchers.

What about the Cloud?

Peter Jones, Shared Infrastructure Services Manager at Oxford University Computing service began his session introducing the Oxford cloud Infrastructure with a quote from Randy Heffner: “The trouble with creating a “cloud strategy”? You’re focusing on technology, not business benefit.” He explained how the main barriers to cloud adoption include understanding costs, reliability (network), portability (lock-in), control, performance and security. However the biggest issue was inertia and reluctance to change. He concluded that a local private cloud overcomes a number of these issues and that the most likely approach is a public private hybrid

It is becoming apparent that the cloud exposes a cost that was previously hidden. However research institutions need to stand by the data they create, therefore the costs need to be observed and paid. James Wilson, ViDaaS project manager, observed that this is how libraries work, however it is not yet recognised in the research world in which people are still trying to offload costs on to other people.

The afternoon breakout allowed more interaction and discussion around some of the highlighted issues, primarily cost, the cloud and national services.

Resources from the day are available on the DataFlow Website.

VALA – Libraries, Technology and the Future Inc. (VALA) is “an Australian not-for-profit professional organisation that promotes the use and understanding of information and communication technologies across the galleries, libraries, archives and museum sectors.” (via VALA on Wikipedia)

• Watch the talk online (1hr)
• Download the slides

My first step in getting myself up to speed will be attending the DCC Roadshow to be held in Brighton from the 4th – 6th October 2011 at the University of Sussex Conference Centre. I attended one day of one of the earlier roadshows held in Bath and thoroughly enjoyed it, so I am very much looking forward to it.

The roadshow consists of three days of training in research data management. Day one is an introductory day aimed at researchers, data curators, staff from library etc. It provides an introduction to the DCC and the role of the DCC in supporting research data management. Day two is a more interactive day aimed at senior managers, research PVCs/Directors, directors of Information Services etc. and looks at strategy/policy implementation. Day three is a proper hands-on day and consists of the Digital Curation 101 – How to manage research data: tips and tools workshop.

Attendees are welcome to dip in an out of the workshops and don’t have to attend the full three days. There are still places available and I’m sure it will a very useful couple of days. Might see you there!

CDCG is an International Collaboration to Integrate Best Practice, Research & Development, and Training in Digital Curation. It has been running since October 2009 and was scheduled to finish in September this year but has just been given an extension (till September 2012). A comprehensive overview of the project is given on the Digital Curation Exchange Web site.

The Closing the Digital Curation Gap (CDCG) collaboration is designed to serve as a locus of interaction between those doing leading edge digital curation research, development, teaching, and training in academic and practitioner communities those with a professional interest in applying viable innovations within particular organizational contexts; IMLS; JISC; the DCC, charged with disseminating such innovation and best practices; and the SCA, charged to build a common information environment where users of publicly funded e-Content can realize best value by reducing the barriers that inhibit access, use and re-use of online content.

I have come along to the project at a fairly late stage but hope I can still be of use and possibly offer a new perspective (that of not being an expert!).

The June meeting was held at the JISC offices in London and was a joint meeting of the US and UK partners. The UK was represented by members from JISC, UKOLN, ULCC, HATII, the BL and the DPC, the US had people from the Bishoff Group, Penn State University Libraries, Purdue University Libraries, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and University of Toronto. [Thanks to Sharon McMeeking from the DPC for sharing her notes to help jig my memory].

The aims of the meeting were to discuss the outputs of the project so far and to set objectives for the continuation of the work in 2011/12. The main work so far has been staging a number of focus groups, work on decision trees and work on best practice guides. The digital curation exchange web site is the key resource that has been created. Much of the meeting involved discussion of the digital curation exchange: we were encouraged to pass on constructive critism, suggestions on process and ideas for future resources.

They have quite a lot to work on before the next meeting – good luck to them!

A Very interesting meeting and in a lot of ways very reassuring. It seems we already have a lot of information, we just need to write them down… easy hey?