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

Draft list of basic RDM infrastructure components – seeking your comments!

The DCC is seeking your comments and feedback on our draft list of basic RDM infrastructure components. This list has been developed through our participation in Jisc’s Research Data Spring pilot to extend the organisational profile document (OPD) to cover research data management.

The key objective for this pilot is to agree within the community a list of basic RDM infrastructure components in light of EPSRC’s Policy Framework on Research Data. This list is meant to represent the basic RDM components that need to be in put into place and maps infrastructure requirements to possible evidence of infrastructure. We’d be very grateful for any feedback from the UK HEI community and funding bodies in particular but also welcome views from other stakeholders. Is this list complete? Are there components that are missing? Please submit directly to the spreadsheet in Google Docs or email your feedback by July 10 2015.

Once the list is agreed, we will seek to make RDM infrastructure components more visible within HEIs by adapting the OPD. The OPD is a simple RDF file which was developed by Equipment.data at the University of Southampton to help HEIs comply with EPSRC’s mandate about exposing information about research equipment bought with public funds. The OPD is both human and machine readable and over 40 UK HEIs already have an OPD in place.

In the short term, this work will help HEIs to identify good practice among peer organisations. Over the longer term, we believe that  an agreed list of basic RDM components will help HEIs to better cooperate to identify metrics for successful implementation, the costs associated with delivering support services and systems, and approaches to sustaining our RDM operations.

Received from:
Joy Davidson
Associate Director
Digital Curation Centre (DCC)
HATII, University of Glasgow
Email: joy.davidson@glasgow.ac.uk
http://www.dcc.ac.uk
http://www.gla.ac.uk/hatii

JPEG2000

What is being said about JPEG2000:

Ria Groenewald provided the following: Although JPEG2000 really is fantastic not all computers are equipped to read the format. The 100% quality (lossy mode) means a 80% compression which is in fact a 20% loss in quality. 48 bit colour is unrealistic at this moment as the most images are still processed at 24 bit, I would love to do it at 48 bit but that will only be a bit of an over-kill resulting in a large file (for us here in Africa struggling with storage space). PSD is not an option at all, and will always be converted to a classical format i.e. TIFF, JPeg, PNG etc which is interoperable formats.

Regardless of the above I want to stress the fact that I do not think that we are far away from the tipping point where we will start working in Jpeg2000. But having said that, the latter format has been in existence for some time now and could not push the “ancient” TIFF format aside which made me think that TIFF is still the best to rely on when it comes to digital preservation of images.

For more information, please refer to Photozone’s analysis