Real world scenarios: data without documentation!
I joined the Open Research team in October, after 15 years of working with museum and archival collections where assisting researchers with finding sources of information, planning research and projects, and helping others with these tasks was an everyday occurrence. This means I feel like I have ‘seen it all’ when it comes to good and bad research data planning.
To show what can happen when there hasn’t been any planning and to help you understand why a plan is important, I present this set of blog posts detailing some real-world scenarios I’ve witnessed.
Real-world cases: No documentation!
A few years ago, I was the Curator for a major restoration project for a historic site. The team knew previous restorations had been done before and so we looked for information telling us what was done and where. What I found was a box of photographs, approximately a thousand images in total, which documented the alterations to the site over 30 years. Now usually photographs are a great dataset for showing you the before, after and during of a project. This should have been a win for the team.
Unfortunately, what had happened was some great fore-thinking in taking the photographs but no plan with how that would be handled, documented or how someone from the future would use them. I still wonder why someone would take photographs for the future but not leave the information that made them useful.
This could have been a really useful dataset for the restoration project. A significant amount of information would have been gained, the project would have been significantly smoother, and it would have saved time and money.
Instead, sadly, each photograph lacked any metadata (not even the year!), and the entire 1000 photographs had been chucked in the box with no organisation, some in their original pharmacy envelopes and others that had come free from these. This meant there was no way to tell which envelope was from what project or what the photographs in the envelope showed. These photographs, taken for this very purpose, were no use. If the team taking the photographs had added some level of organisation or documentation to each envelope of photographs, or better yet, added metadata to each image at the time, it would be a very different circumstance.
In an attempt to make something out of these, there are now plans for a multi-year volunteer project to try and sort these into some order and discover the information which makes these photographs useful. What would have taken an hour or so at the time will now take years of research.