RDM at UEL: agile, fragile or feral?
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Presentation by Stephen Grace of the University of East London. It was presented at the LSHTM Research Data Services workshop on June 30th 2015, an event organised to mark the end of LSHTM's Wellcome Trust funded RDM project.
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RDM at UEL: agile, fragile or feral?
- 1. RDM at UEL: agile, fragile or feral? Stephen Grace http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8874-2671 LSHTM workshop on RDM services, London, 30 June 2015
- 2. Outline • UEL context • What we do • Achievements • Gap analysis • Don’t believe the hype
- 3. Context • Personal interest and expertise • UEL took a carefully considered institutional approach to RDM • Drafted RDM policy Jan 2012, adopted by Research Committee Mar 2012 • Library seen as a trusted partner by academics and the natural home for RDM support Help – EPSRC!
- 4. Service offer • Data management plans – drafting, reviewing, templates for staff and PGR students on DMPonline • Training workshops part of Graduate School’s Researcher Devt. Programme • Bespoke support, advice and guidance • Data repository for archiving and sharing • Robust archiving using Arkivum service
- 5. Resources • 0.5 FTE of Research Services Librarian • 1.0 FTE Research Data Mgt. Officer (a new permanent post 2013-) • Capital investment – data repository c£15k – archival storage c£36k • www.uel.ac.uk/researchdata support website (that’s still under development)
- 6. Achievements • 4 workshops, c.100 people 2013-15 • Data management plans c.20 per year • Data repository at data.uel.ac.uk • Advice and guidance – Bespoke training in a research institute – Embedded training for profdoc course – Suggested changes re: research integrity
- 12. A project description http://data.uel.ac.uk/11/
- 13. A catalogue record for data held elsewhere http://data.uel.ac.uk/14/
- 14. Gap analysis • Data Intelligence: We don’t know about all the research activity across the University • Data Expertise: Every deposit is a new project, so moving to guided deposit rather than mediated • Data Service: We are building up relations with service colleagues, but this is time- consuming and patchy • Data Direction: Sometimes it helps to have top-level support
- 15. Don’t believe the hype • It’s not difficult to get going – Even without strategic direction • People aren’t clamouring to share their data – But some are, and they’re excited – Students are very receptive and see this as normal practice • It’s not dull – training in particular is rewarding
- 16. If you want to know more Jisc/DCC case study published 29/06/15: http://repository.jisc. ac.uk/6062/5/Jisc- DCC- EPSRC_CASE_ST UDY-UEL.pdf
- 17. Thank you Stephen Grace, Research Services Librarian http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8874-2671 Email s.grace@uel.ac.uk Blog at datamanagementuel.wordpress.com Twitter @StephenGraceful roar.uel.ac.uk data.uel.ac.uk
Editor's Notes
- This is an example of a workshop we run. Two hours, an overview of RDM Defining your data Looking after your data Sharing your data Archiving your data Executing your plan
- And this was the feedback from that course in February 2015: concrete actions and learning points from the participants
- Research Dialogues – halfway between a drop-in session and a workshop, with a short presentation and time for questions and discussion over sandwiches. This didn’t work so well – we only had two attendees to one, and only one to the other session. BUT we had great interaction with researchers, and nothing beats understanding what they do, their research interests and disciplinary practice. We kept it deliberately vague to encompass RDM, open access and other scholarly communications topics. And you’ll see we borrowed the brand of the Graduate School – they just advertised through their normal channels something that David and I undertook.
- Bespoke UEL templates for staff and research students on DMPonline. For staff we have a light DMP at application stage and fuller one at award stage. Having said that, no one has asked for help with drafting a DMP when there is no external funder requirement, despite our institutional RDM policy saying, “Data management plans (DMP) are mandated at UEL for all externally-funded datasets created after 1 May 2012, and recommended for other datasets.” We will write the first draft DMP, comment on an author draft, or engage in a more iterative process with face to face meetings – as the researcher wishes. We haven’t tracked the success of our help in drafting DMPs, though of course we take any and all credit.
- Our first dataset. An important study, which informed policy in more than one Indian state and formed the basis of one of the impact case studies in REF2014 submission. If you are wanting to launch a data repository with a good example – you might not want to start with someone who leaves your university to take up a job elsewhere, or choose documents with bilingual content in languages you haven’t heard of requiring additional fonts to be installed by IT, where a cursory check of the SPSS files showed it wasn’t in fact anonymised, and where you were seeking consent from project collaborators on three continents in four different organisations. But credit to Professor Rao and her colleagues for seeing this through. We’ve decided to use the assisted deposit mode where we sit alongside the researcher and guide them through the process. Until we get a broad range of data offered to us, every deposit is a new project with its own challenges of appraisal and description.
- As well as data collections, we have project-level records. These act as containers for data collections – possibly multiple data objects per project, or relationships with previous projects. But no assumptions about parent-child or sibling-sibling relationships.
- And this is a description of data held elsewhere, in this case at the UK Data Service, with mention of the project in Gateway to Research (the second grey external link).