Real world scenarios: forgot your data reference!
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: forgetting your data reference.
Everyone understands the need to cite sources. When working with datasets which belong to someone else, not only it is important to acknowledge the owner of the dataset, but also to record enough information so that the dataset can be easily accessed by the owner if needed.
My experience of this came from researchers pointing to our archives in their Data Access Statement, however the details of the records they used were not included in their bibliography. This meant that I struggled to share this data when new researchers asked as it was unclear what it was they were requesting access to.
Worse than this, was when researchers didn’t note what they had used on a visit. Whilst their descriptions always provided a lot of detail, in a special collection, specialising on a specific area, this will do nothing to narrow down what you want to revisit.
You can avoid these hassles in a very simple and easy way. When using the archive, make a note of the accession or reference number of each item you look at. If there is one number for multiple items make a record for your own memory which will help you identify the record, for example: Ref Number MC2015.31 letter dated 25th March. This will help you, and others when you need access to these again.