Highlights from the RDM Programme Progress Report: Nov – Dec 2014

Posted on 24 February 2015 by smacdonald

Key results from the regular RDM Programme Progress Reports presented to both RDM Steering Committee and Action Group. Full RDM progress Reports can be viewed on the RDM programme Wiki (University of Edinburgh only).

Equality Impact Assessment (EqIA) for the RDM programme was completed and published on the Estates and Buildings website (see: http://www.docs.csg.ed.ac.uk/EqualityDiversity/EIA/Research_Data_Management_Programme_%28RDM%29_%28IS%29.pdf)
Stuart Macdonald and co-author Rory Macneil (RSpace) had a paper (Service integraiton to Enhance RDM: Electronic laboratory Notebook Case Study) accepted for presentation at the International Conference on Digital Curation (London, Feb. 2015).
Work has commenced to update deadlines and deliverables in the RDM Project Plan.
Successful meeting held with the Software Sustainability Institute to discuss software preservation used/generated in the research process resulting in a number of areas of investigation (see: https://libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk/2014/12/
FOSTER EU proposal funded for a training event based on MANTRA to be given to the Scottish Social Science Graduate Summer School programme.
All items in Datashare now have DataCite DOIs.
Data Library have established a new online statistical analysis and visualisation service (SDA) which can provide an add-on service for DataShare.
39 RDM Training courses scheduled for Jan-June 2015. Training materials for two new courses is also being prepared.
All data from College File servers complete with all data expected to have been migrated to Datastore by end of January 2015.
Positive review and report received on the DataStore Infrastructure by external consultant.
Edinburgh DMP template revised based on Action group Feedback.
Visitors from Germany (Goettingen, November), Switzerland (Ecole Polytechnique Federal de Lausanne, December), and France (Sciences Po, December) met with IS colleagues to learn more about the RDM programme.
“Research Data MANTRA: A Labour of Love” (by Robin Rice) was published to Journal of eScience Librarianship following invitation and a peer review process: http://escholarship.umassmed.edu/jeslib/vol3/iss1/4
Two submissions to the Jisc Digital Festival event in March (RDM Training with MANTRA & RDM Programme @ Univ. of Edinburgh) have been accepted.

Stuart Macdonald
RDM Service Coordinator

New release of Research Data MANTRA (Management Training) online course

Posted on 5 September 2014 by Robin Rice

The Research Data MANTRA course is an open, online training course that provides instruction in good practice in research data management. There are nine interactive learning units on key topics such as data management planning, organising and formatting data, using shared data and licensing your own data, as well as four data handling tutorials with open datasets for use in R, SPSS, NVivo and ArcGIS.

This fourth release of MANTRA has been revised and systematically updated with new content, videos, reading lists, and interactive quizzes. Three of the data handling tutorials have been rewritten and tested for newer software versions too.

New content in the online learning modules with the September, 2014 release:

New video footage from previous interviewees and introducing Richard Rodger, Professor of Economic and Social History and Stephen Lawrie, Professor of Psychiatry & Neuro-Imaging
Big Data now in Research Data Explained
Data citation and ‘reproducible research’ added to Documentation and Metadata
Safe password practice and more on encryption in Storage and Security
Refined information about the DPA and IPR in Data Protection, Rights and Access
Linked Open Data and CC 4.0 and CC0 now covered in Sharing, Preservation & Licensing

This release will also be more stable and more accessible due to back-end enhancements. The flow of the learning units and usability of quizzes have been improved based on testing and feedback. We have simplified our feedback form and added a four-star rating button to the home page. A YouTube playlist for each unit is available on the Data Library channel.

MANTRA was originally created with funding from Jisc and is maintained by EDINA and Data Library, a division of Information Services, University of Edinburgh. It is an integral part of the University’s Research Data Management Programme and is designed to be modular and self-paced for maximum convenience; it is a non-assessed training course targeted at postgraduate research students and early career researchers.

Data management skills enable researchers to better organise, document, store and share data, making research more reproducible and preserving it for future use. Researchers in 144 countries used MANTRA last year, which is available without registration from the website. Postgraduate training organisations in the UK, Canada, and Australia have used the Creative Commons licensed material in the Jorum repository to create their own training. The website also hosts a ‘training kit’ for librarians wishing to increase their skills in supporting Research Data Management.

Visit MANTRA and consider recommending it to your colleagues and research students this term! http://datalib.edina.ac.uk/mantra/

Usage Statistics

According to Google Analytics, the following organisation’s websites were the top ten referrers to the MANTRA website for the academic year 2013-2014 (discounting Data Library, EDINA and Information Services):

Institute for Academic Development, University of Edinburgh
LIS Links (India)
Digital Curation Centre
eScience Portal for New England Libraries at University of Massachusetts Medical Library
Oxford University
University of Nebraska-Lincoln (USA)
Carleton University (Canada)
Glasgow University
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
Jisc

Social media sites Facebook, Twitter and Slideshare provided a large number of referrals; several more came from other UK institutions, and HEIs in Australia, the rest of Europe, and North America—University Library pages especially. Forty percent of sessions came from a referring website.

Visitors to MANTRA over the year came from 144 countries. Google searches accounted for 4,000 sessions, 25% of the total. Nearly ten thousand visits were from new users (based on IP addresses) over the year from 22nd August, 2013 – 23rd August, 2014. Here is a link to a Google Analytics summary spreadsheet extracted from our account.

We expect to have more detailed usage statistics over the forthcoming year due to moving the learning units out of the authoring software (Xerte Online Toolkits) onto the main MANTRA website.

Postscript, 15 Sept: See my Storify story, “Research Data MANTRA Buzz” to find out who’s been talking about MANTRA on twitter!

Robin Rice
Data Librarian

Upcoming Dealing with Data Conference and RDM Service Launch

Posted on 21 August 2014 by Robin Rice

The Edinburgh RDM team is a-buzz this week with preparations for the launch of our services, which will be carried out by the University’s Principal, Sir Timothy O’Shea in the Library next Tuesday morning, 26th August, 2014 with 120 stakeholders in attendance.

Although the RDM Policy was passed by the University Court in May, 2011, and our RDM Roadmap work began in earnest in August 2012, it has taken until now to be sure our core services are ready for a formal launch. See this post by the RDM Services Coordinator for a recent snapshot of Roadmap progress.

The launch will be short and sweet–lasting no more than half an hour. But the event is enhanced by a mini-conference, featuring researchers discussing Dealing with Data from across the disciplinary spectrum. If they mention any of our services that will be a bonus for us! The programme is available now, and a summary will be posted after the event.

For those who want to follow live tweets, the hashtag will be #DWD2014. For those who attend, be sure and fill out the feedback form at https://www.survey.ed.ac.uk/dealing_data-feedback!

Robin Rice on behalf of Cuna Ekmekcioglu (RDM team)

RDM Roadmap: Completion of Phase 1

Posted on 6 August 2014 by smacdonald

The Research Data Management (RDM) Programme is well underway with planning and pilot activity (phase 0 of the RDM Roadmap), and initial roll-out of primary services (phase 1) completed. Services include:

DMPonline – an online tool by the Digital Curation Centre that assists researchers to produce an effective data management plan (DMP) to cater for the whole lifecycle of a project
Research Data Blog – set up by the RDM Action Group to communicate progress on the RDM programme.

RDM Website – a One Stop Shop for all university RDM materials (FAQs, key messages, RDM planning guidance, service guides)
Research Data MANTRA – an online course designed for researchers or others planning to manage digital data as part of the research process
Edinburgh DataShare – the online digital repository of multi-disciplinary research datasets produced at the University of Edinburgh
DataStore – a new central facility to store data actively used in current research activities. DataStore provides all researchers with a free at point of use allocation (currently 0.5TB). Researchers can assign up to 50% (0.25TB) of their free individual allocation to shared project spaces. Additional capacity can be purchased above this, with support for very large data (>1PB) hosting available.

Phase 2: (June 2014 – May 2015) will see continued rollout and maturation of services. Services in development include:

the Data Asset Registry (DAR) – a catalogue of data assets produced by researchers working for the University of Edinburgh to aid discovery access and reuse
the Data Vault – a secure, private and long-term ‘vault’ of data that is only accessible by the creator or their representative

We are currently gathering requirements to inform design of the DAR and Data Vault services. Upcoming Roadmap milestones will subsequently tackle requisite interoperation between existing and planned RDM services.

There are a number of different groups within the university and outside with whom we need to communicate our RDM programme. These include research active staff, support and administrative staff, university committees and groups (research policy group, library and IT committees, knowledge strategy committee) as well as external collaborators and stakeholders such as funding bodies etc. This is being done through a variety of communication activities including a range of training programmes on research data management (RDM) in the form of workshops, seminars and drop in sessions to help researchers with research data management issues along with formal and bespoke awareness raising sessions within schools for research and support staff. The clear message that we want to communicate is that the University is committed to and has invested in RDM services, training, and support, and that the University is supporting researchers, encouraging good research practice, and effecting culture change.

The RDM Services will be formally launched by the Principal on 26th August, 2014 along with an associated conference ‘Dealing with Data’ which offers researchers the opportunity to present on any aspect of the challenges and advances in working with data, particularly research data with novel methods of creating, using, storing, visualising or sharing data.

Stuart Macdonald

RDM Services Co-ordinator

Edinburgh Research Data Blog