St Andrews Hosted Jisc 3rd Research Data Network
It is now the New Year, and several weeks since the Jisc Research Data Shared Service (RDSS) Pilots meeting and the Research Data Network day took place in St Andrews. It seems a good time to look back and reflect on what happened at these events.
These events, dedicated to research data management concerns, were hosted by the University Library and took place in the University of St Andrews Medical and Biological Sciences Building on 29th and 30th November.
Pilot Day
The RDSS Pilot day was attended by 40 people from 22 institutions involved in the Jisc RDSS project in some way. The purpose of this day was generally to catch up on progress with the project, and consider future plans together.
In addition to the talks and discussion about past and future developments in the project, there were a number of talks. Tom Parsons and Andrea Chiarelli gave an overview of the findings from the Data Asset Framework (DAF) survey. The DAF survey was performed by several of the institutions involved in the RDSS pilot as part of the requirements gathering process, and was completed by almost 1200 researchers from 6 institutions – including 300 from St Andrews. The full report on the survey can be found here. There is also a summary of the overall results, and a summary of the results of the software section of the survey on the St Andrews Library Blog.
Representatives from Preservica and Archivematica provided details about their products and approaches to preservation, and Carl Wilson of the Open Preservation Foundation spoke about format identification tools for preservation.
RDN Day
Around 100 people attended the 3rd Research Data Network workshop the following day, from institutions across the UK. The purpose of this workshop series is to bring together people working in higher education to exchange knowledge around the practical implementation of research data management (RDM). Previous RDN days have taken place in Cambridge in September, and Cardiff in May.
The RDN day took place on St Andrew’s Day. Rachel Bruce, Jisc Deputy Chief Innovation Officer, began by wishing everyone a Happy St Andrew’s Day!
The keynote address was given by John MacColl, University Librarian and Director of Library Services at St Andrews. He spoke about why research data matters to libraries, highlighting the need for research profile management, and the importance of research data in supporting the integrity of science.
John MacColl also began with a reference to St Andrew’s Day, along with an explanation of the St Andrews Coat of Arms. He also explained why the University of St Andrews has no apostrophe, but St Andrew’s Day does. Basically, the Town and the University are older than the apostrophe!
John MacColl giving the keynote address.
The morning workshop session involved a choice of three strands, one of which covered “Researchers’ perspectives on active research data”. This session included two talks by St Andrews researchers about their experiences with active data management and research procedures. The speakers were Tomas Lebl from Chemistry, and Clint Blight from Biology (Sea Mammal Research Unit). Tomas spoke about the development of the NOMAD system, which automates and simplifies some key workflows in NMR lab management, data acquisition and access. Clint shared his experiences of managing data as a Scientific Software Engineer & Geoinformatician in the Sea Mammal Research Unit. He also spoke about the development of SMRUDAS, a new in-house system that has been built to help the Unit to manage its data and metadata.
The other two parallel sessions covered engaging with arts and humanities researchers, and using community-generated rubrics to evaluate data management plans.
Some RDN Workshop attendees during a break.
The afternoon included ‘Birds of a Feather’ sessions, aimed at encouraging discussion between those with common issues and concerns. Topics discussed included: sharing non-open data in controlled conditions, CRIS for research data, metadata, and research impact measures and measurement.
The afternoon parallel workshop strands again offered three areas to choose from. This time the topics were: frictionless data for research, minting DOIs, and discovering the Research Data Alliance.
The final talk of the day was by research data managers, Veerle Van den Eynden and Gareth Knight, from the University of Essex and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. They gave an overview of a survey commissioned by the Wellcome Trust investigating researcher’s attitudes and behaviours towards open research.
Further details about the sessions, and slides from some of the talks, can be found on the Research Data Network webpages.
The next RDN day will take place in the University of York in June 2017.
Photos by University of St Andrews.