Author Archives for louisepatterton

New England Collaborative Data Management Curriculum (NECDMC)

Clairoux, Natalie. 2015. “En Français S’il Vous Plaît: Translation and Adaptation of the New England Collaborative Data Management Curriculum’s Introductory Module.” Journal of eScience Librarianship 4(1): e1079. http://dx.doi.org/10.7191/jeslib.2015.1079

Abstract: The New England Collaborative Data Management Curriculum (NECDMC) is “an instructional tool for teaching data management best practices to undergraduates, graduate students, and researchers in the health sciences” (Lamar Soutter Library 2015a). This article reports on the French translation and adaptation of the first module of the NECDMC as part of the design of a short library instruction workshop.

Keywords: data management, instruction, NECDMC, Canada, French, translation

How to Track the Impact of Research Data with Metrics

This guide will help you to track and measure the impact of research data, whether your own or that of your department/institution. It provides an overview of the key impact measurement concepts and the services and tools available for measuring impact. After discussing some of the current issues and challenges, it provides some tips on increasing the impact of your own data. This guide should interest researchers and principal investigators working on data-led research, administrators working with research quality assessment submissions, librarians and others helping to track the impact of data within institutions.

See more at: http://www.dcc.ac.uk/resources/how-guides/track-data-impact-metrics#sthash.0iXrTVQQ.dpuf

Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles

Received from Martie van Deventer:

Data citation principles:
Sound, reproducible scholarship rests upon a foundation of robust, accessible data. For this to be so in practice as well as theory, data must be accorded due importance in the practice of scholarship and in the enduring scholarly record. In other words, data should be considered legitimate, citable products of research. Data citation, like the citation of other evidence and sources, is good research practice and is part of the scholarly ecosystem supporting data reuse.

In support of this assertion, and to encourage good practice, we offer a set of guiding principles for data within scholarly literature, another dataset, or any other research object.

These principles are the synthesis of work by a number of groups. As we move into the next phase, we welcome your participation and endorsement of these principles.

Data archiving, management initiatives and expertise in the Biological Sciences Department, University of Cape Town

We received the following from Margaret Koopman, Data Librarian, SAEON Fynbos Node:

My MLIS is now on the OpenUCT repository (Data archiving, management initiatives and expertise in the Biological Sciences Department, University of Cape Town).
It is available via http://hdl.handle.net/11427/13656
Abstract:
Researchers produce large amounts of data during their research investigations and have a variety of interventions for the management of these data. It has not been the responsibility of academic institutions to manage research data, this responsibility has resided with the researchers and their research units. This investigation attempted to understand how pre-digital, early digital and current digital research data in the Biological Sciences Department at the University of Cape Town had been and is being managed, if researchers had archived any of these data and what their opinions were on sharing their research data. Long-term ecological data are an important component of research in the Biological Sciences Department as researchers wish to understand ecosystem changes such as climate change, the spread of alien species and the impact of humans on land and marine exploitation. It is consequently critical that research data, past and present are properly managed for future research so that meaningful management decisions can be made. Research Data Management and the Research Life Cycle are phrases that are very much in the literature at present as librarians and university administrators grapple with the task of implementing data policies and data repositories. The literature review revealed that although the University of Cape Town may be a somewhat behind other international institutions in engaging with Research Data Management and repositories, investigations have been ongoing in other parts of the world and in the international community the groundwork has already been done. Research data have been the preserve of researchers and they are reluctant to give up control of their hard-earned data, usually the result of hours spent on funding applications, and field or laboratory work. Data sets of sufficient quantity and quality to answer research questions can take a researcher a lifetime to accumulate and they understandably do not wish to make these openly available without the insurance that their work will be acknowledged. The findings of this research project revealed that in the absence of systematic data management initiatives at institutional level, researchers had preserved many long-term data sets and in some instances were archiving with international repositories specific to their data types. The findings resulted in a range of suggested interventions for the support of Research Data Management at the University of Cape Town.

Workshop 11 August 2015: presentations