The Research Data Support team has had some noteworthy changes in the last few months.
Longtime staff member Pauline Ward has embraced a new management role as Data Repository Operations Officer, where she will work with two Research Data Support Assistants, myself as service owner, and the Digital Library software engineers. The Digital Library hosts our open and restricted access repositories, DataShare and DataVault – to ensure smooth operations of these data archiving solutions into the future. The two new Research Data Support Assistants are Maeve McCann and Stefano Bordoni, who will be supporting users with our repositories Edinburgh DataShare and DataVault, among other activities with the team (time will tell!).
Maeve has previously worked for the IT team at the University of Edinburgh’s School of 
Philosophy, Psychology & Language Sciences (PPLS), where she was responsible for the development and management of the student and volunteer research databases. She led the implementation of the Volunteer Panel – a bespoke system for researchers and participants to post and sign up for studies and Maeve also provided technical support for the PPLS Ethics system.
Prior to working for the university, Maeve has held roles with several children’s charities and management consultancy firms. In her free time, Maeve enjoys mountain biking, skiing and travel.
Stefano Bordoni has recently completed a Doctorate in Archaeology at The University of Edinburgh, with a thesis on historic masonry techniques and building materials in Umbria (Italy). During this experience, he took advantage of IT tools in exploring the informative potential stored in medieval and early modern constructions. In his years in academia, he has taken part in several archaeological projects and excavations. Among them, he established and supervised the Pietrarossa Archaeological Excavation (University of Perugia) and managed the GIS platform for the Water in Istanbul Project (British Institute at Ankara & partners).
Prior to his current role, he has worked within the University of Edinburgh as a Tutor in the School of History, Classics & Archaeology, a CDCS Training Fellow (at the Centre for Data, Culture & Society), and EdHelp Information and Support Assistant, in Information Services. In his free time, he loves cooking traditional Umbrian food, foraging wild mushrooms and cycling.
Before the end of the year we bid goodbye to colleagues Dr Bob Sanders, now taking up a lead training role with the Scottish Centre for Administrative Data Research (SCADR) based in the School of Geosciences here, and Yue Gu, Research Data Steward, a PhD candidate in Econometrics who has taken an analyst role at Natwest.
Good luck to everyone in their new roles!
Robin Rice
Data Librarian and Head, Research Data Support
One of the ambitions for the EOR conference held in March, 2022, when we first started planning it was to make it as open and accessible as possible. To achieve this we made the whole event hybrid so that plenary talks, posters, and workshops were all accessible on the day to both in person and remote attendees. While this generally worked very well for both remote and in-person attendees, we also wanted to make it available to people who couldn’t attend on the day – so we recorded everything, and the recordings of the talks and posters can now be openly accessed through our Edinburgh Open Research journal at 
Attendees online and in person were treated to a fine and varied selection of talks. To begin with, topics ranged from Gavin McLachlan’s overview of current national and international political contexts and Dominic Tate’s review of the University’s Open Research Roadmap, to the latest in open access publishing from Rebecca Wojturska and Dominique Walker, FAIR principles from Susanna-Assunta Sansone, and Eugenia Rodrigues on inclusivity and Citizen Science.
Nicely complementing Madeleine’s study, Emma MacKenzie and Felicity Anderson gave us the benefit of hands-on experience. Speaking from either side of the student-supervisor relation, they described their use of open source tools, materials, and mind-sets in student projects. Here, too, we saw the development of core competencies, this time including the documentation, discussion, and resolution of errors.
There were also poster sessions, culminating in first prize for Livia Scorza’s ‘Not going to waste – preserving Scotland’s COVID-19 waste water data,’ and there were workshops covering everything from public engagement to Open Research and AI.