Week 13, ANDS Project

Had two meetings on Monday, one was with the new member of the working party as the researcher representative.  It was very informal but we got to talk about the data management project and I filled her in on some of the background to the project.  I also worked on the outline for the RDM toolkit.

I gave a presentation to the research librarians giving a general overview of data management and we then just had a discussion around data management and it’s definitions for instance what a data collection was.  This is so if they are asked about data management in the faculty they would have a good general idea of the main concepts and know that I was the person to talk too.

Spoke to Luis about preparing an information session around a researchers needs.  I am still not sure how to make the session sound attractive to entice researchers.

I went to a HeardC presentation in my lunch time just so I could start to understand some of the metrics that are used to measure researcher and university value.

Week 12, ANDS Project

I completed the first draft of the terms of reference for the reference group which I will get reviewed for the first reference group meeting.  I have not tried drafting TOR before so a new task for me.  I tried to review what we would really need a researcher perspective on. The plan is that the reference group members will also become spokespeople for the research data management project.

I completed the presentation for new researchers for the CRN projects on Thursday.  I have tried to take a more research lifecycle point of view rather than a data centric point of view as per the Library Loon’s blog post.  The presentation went well and I think focusing on the researcher milestones rather than the data milestones helped to give the presentation better relevance to the researchers.  A number of researchers came and spoke to me about DM during morning tea, showing interest in practical solutions.

The reference group meeting went well and the terms of reference were accepted almost unchanged.  We have two members with an HPC interest, a climate scientist and archaeologist.  This appears to be a good number of people to achieve some action.  They read and commented on our draft research management policy.  The only change suggested was a slight change to the wording of one section.

I wrote an information sheet for our research data management tool kit on data storage.  I think I have it at an appropriate practical level.

Week 11, ANDS Project

Spent time working on the procedures for an information security procedure for research data management.  Meeting with the policy officer again on Wednesday.

Read very interesting post from UWS on the workflow of research data management.  They had included some sequence diagrams that helped to express the workflows very neatly.  On http://eresearch.uws.edu.au/blog/2012/08/17/potential-research-data-repository-data-management-use-cases-for-discussion/ I think this really adds to the conversation about the workflows here.  Another thing which resonates with me is the Library Loon statement that data management lifecycles place data at the centre but this is not how researchers see the place of data.  Instead we should see how data fits into the research lifecycle http://gavialib.com/2012/08/data-lifecycles-versus-research-lifecycles/. 

The library has brought a copy of the book Managing Research Data (Pryor, G (ed.) 2012, Managing research data, Facet Publishing, London.)  the chapter I have read so far are interesting particularly the one on the life cycle although it takes a very data centric point of view rather than a researcher centric view.  However the information is good.  Some of the chapters take a very library orientated point of view so focus on what data management means to the librarian.

Still been working on the procedures part of this issue is working out the workflow of the researcher so I will draw on some of Peter Sefton’s sequence diagrams.  I am trying to examine necessary procedures for information security.

Week 9, ANDS Project

Spent time looking up implementation plans, the one I really liked was the roadmap from Surrey University http://portal.surrey.ac.uk/pls/portal/docs/PAGE/INFOMGMT/RESEARCHDATAROADMAP.PDF

This was done in conjunction with JISC but the layout of:

1.      Where do we want to be

2.      What do we have at the moment

3.      What do we need – Gaps

4.      Roadmap areas

Seemed to lay out a plan for implementation in nice easy to follow steps