Digital Curation and Doctoral Research

This article considers digital curation in doctoral study and the role of the doctoral supervisor and institution in facilitating students’ acquisition of digital curation skills, including some of the potentially problematic expectations of the supervisory relationship with regards to digital curation. Research took the form of an analysis of the current digital curation training landscape, focussing on doctoral study and supervision. This was followed by a survey (n=116) investigating attitudes towards importance, expertise, and responsibilities regarding digital curation. This research confirms that digital curation is considered to be very important within doctoral study but that doctoral supervisors and particularly students consider themselves to be largely unskilled at curation tasks. It provides a detailed picture of curation activity within doctoral study and identifies the areas of most concern. A detailed analysis demonstrates that most of the responsibility for curation is thought to lie with students and that institutions are perceived to have very low responsibility and that individuals tend to over-assign responsibility to themselves. Finally, the research identifies which types of support system for curation are most used and makes suggestions for ways in which students, supervisors, institutions, and others can effectively and efficiently address problematic areas and improve digital curation within doctoral study

International data curation education action (IDEA) working group: a report from the second workshop of IDEA

The second workshop of the International Data curation Education (IDEA) Working Group was held December 5, 2008, in Edinburgh, Scotland, following the 4th International Digital Curation Conference. This workshop was jointly organized by the UK's Digital Curation Centre (DCC), the US's Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), and the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (SILS). Nearly forty educators and researchers accepted invitations to attend, with representation from universities, research centers, and funding agencies from Canada, the US, the UK, and Germany

DATUM for Health: Research data management training for health studies

This collaborative project sought to promote research data management skills of postgraduate research students in the health studies discipline through a specially-developed training programme which focuses on qualitative, unstructured research data. The project aimed to: design and pilot a training programme on research data management for postgraduate research students in health studies as an integral part of a doctoral training programme evaluate the usefulness and effectiveness of the training with participants and other research stakeholders provide other Higher Education Institutions with a model for research data management skills training make recommendations for sustainable research data management training and associated infrastructure requirements. The project was funded by JISC under their Managing Research Data (JISCMRD) Programme. The project ran from 1st October 2010 to 31st July 2011

An Assessment of Doctoral Biomedical Student Research Data Management Needs

Objective This analysis explores specific institutional repository (IR) data management needs of the University’s biomedical sciences doctoral students. Awareness, intentions, attitudes, and concerns about depositing, sharing and publishing supplemental ETD (electronic thesis and dissertation) research data into the library’s institutional repository eScholarship@UMMS were explored. Methods A data needs assessment survey focused around the Digital Curation Centre’s lifecycle model and National Science Foundation’s requirements for data management was sent to 470 students via a listserv. Information gathered from the survey and digital repository literature aided in the construction of an overarching student data curation profile and criteria for repository functionality to meet the needs of both researchers and the repository manager. Results Eighty-two biomedical PhD students responded to the data needs survey, a response rate of 17.4%. 69.5% were unaware that they had the option to deposit their research data sets into the IR. File format of data sets varied greatly but most common were TIFF, PDF, and JPG. 25.6% of respondents did not know the average size of their data sets. A network shared drive was the most common means of storing data (75.0%) but many used multiple methods. 96.0% reported using a metadata data entry standard developed by their lab. 13.9% stated they would not be willing to share data sets openly or publicly. Conclusion Responses from the survey and interviews suggest that an IR needs to be flexible to accommodate the research data needs of biomedical PhD students. Functionality to handle various file types, large files, and embargos is required. Education and outreach by library staff about the IR, data documentation, data sharing, and many facets of research data management would be useful. A broader environmental scan and further research are required to evaluate repository functionality in light of the needs of both researchers and the repository manager

Education alignment

This essay reviews recent developments in embedding data management and curation skills into information technology, library and information science, and research-based postgraduate courses in various national contexts. The essay also investigates means of joining up formal education with professional development training opportunities more coherently. The potential for using professional internships as a means of improving communication and understanding between disciplines is also explored. A key aim of this essay is to identify what level of complementarity is needed across various disciplines to most effectively and efficiently support the entire data curation lifecycle

The Data Management Skills Support Initiative: synthesising postgraduate training in research data management

<p>This paper will describe the efforts and findings of the JISC Data Management Skills Support Initiative (‘DaMSSI’). DaMSSI was co-funded by the JISC Managing Research Data programme and the Research Information Network (RIN), in partnership with the Digital Curation Centre, to review, synthesise and augment the training offerings of the JISC Research Data Management Training Materials (‘RDMTrain’) projects.</p> <p>DaMSSI tested the effectiveness of the Society of College, National and University Libraries’ Seven Pillars of Information Literacy model (SCONUL, 2011), and Vitae’s Researcher Development Framework (‘Vitae RDF’) for consistently describing research data management (‘RDM’) skills and skills development paths in UK HEI postgraduate courses.</p> <p>With the collaboration of the RDMTrain projects, we mapped individual course modules to these two models and identified basic generic data management skills alongside discipline-specific requirements. A synthesis of the training outputs of the projects was then carried out, which further investigated the generic versus discipline-specific considerations and other successful approaches to training that had been identified as a result of the projects’ work. In addition we produced a series of career profiles to help illustrate the fact that data management is an essential component – in obvious and not-so-obvious ways – of a wide range of professions.</p> <p>We found that both models had potential for consistently and coherently describing data management skills training and embedding this within broader institutional postgraduate curricula. However, we feel that additional discipline-specific references to data management skills could also be beneficial for effective use of these models. Our synthesis work identified that the majority of core skills were generic across disciplines at the postgraduate level, with the discipline-specific approach showing its value in engaging the audience and providing context for the generic principles.</p> <p>Findings were fed back to SCONUL and Vitae to help in the refinement of their respective models, and we are working with a number of other projects, such as the DCC and the EC-funded Digital Curator Vocational Education Europe (DigCurV2) initiative, to investigate ways to take forward the training profiling work we have begun.</p&gt

Data management of nanometre­ scale CMOS device simulations

In this paper we discuss the problems arising in managing and curating the data generated by simulations of nanometre scale CMOS (Complementary Metal–Oxide Semiconductor) transistors, circuits and systems and describe the software and operational techniques we have adopted to address them. Such simulations pose a number of challenges including, inter alia, multi­TByte data volumes, complex datasets with complex inter-relations between datasets, multi­-institutional collaborations including multiple specialisms and a mixture of academic and industrial partners, and demanding security requirements driven by commercial imperatives. This work was undertaken as part of the NanoCMOS project. However, the problems, solutions and experience seem likely to be of wider relevance, both within the CMOS design community and more generally in other disciplines

Addressing data management training needs: a practice based approach from the UK

In this paper, we describe the current challenges to the effective management and preservation of research data in UK universities, and the response provided by the JISC Managing Research Data programme. This paper will discuss, inter alia, the findings and conclusions from data management training projects of the first iteration of the programme and how they informed the design of the second, paying particular attention to initiatives to develop and embed training materials

University of Massachusetts Amherst Response to Draft Desirable Characteristics of Repositories for Managing and Sharing Data Resulting From Federally Funded Research

Response to the Office of Science and Technology Policy\u27s Draft Desirable Characteristics of Repositories for Managing and Sharing Data Resulting from Federally Funded Research. Original call for public response is available at https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2020/01/17/2020-00689/request-for-public-comment-on-draft-desirable-characteristics-of-repositories-for-managing-an

Evaluation of options for a UK electronic thesis service: study report

The British Library (BL), JISC, UK HE institutions and CURL have funded an 18-month project to develop a national framework for the provision, preservation and open access to electronic theses produced in UK HE institutions. The project, called EThOS (Electronic Theses Online Service) was developed in response to a competitive tender invitation released by the JISC and proposes a service set up and run by the British Library. The British Library’s current service, the British Thesis Service, offers access to around 180,000 doctoral theses, predominantly from 1970 onwards, though it is estimated that overall some half million theses dating from the 1600s are in existence in the UK. Around 80% of requests are for theses published within the last 13 years and almost all of these exist only in hardcopy. Through this service, theses are acquired ‘on demand’ and delivered on microfilm at a cost of just over £60 to the user (and at this price the service runs at a loss). Whilst this service, coupled with the Index to Theses (Expert Information), enables the location of and access to relatively recent British theses by the determined seeker, no one could argue that the process is optimised. As a result, usage of theses is much lower than it might be and much research is going unnoticed and unused as a result. Conversely, it has been shown that when theses are easy to locate and access, usage is high: at Virginia Tech, a pioneer site in the provision of a formal, systematised ETD (electronic theses and dissertations) service, downloads have been shown to increase over 30-fold when a thesis is available free online and easily located. A national service for the UK that provides discovery and access to theses in electronic form via the Web will increase the utility of doctoral scholarship. A single interface that directs users to theses wherever they are held, and which addresses the issues of intellectual property, permissions, royalties, preservation, discovery, and other matters associated with the public provision of theses in electronic form, will be of great benefit to the scholarly community in the UK and across the world. The EThOS project (Electronic Theses Online Service) was commissioned to develop a model for a workable, sustainable and acceptable national service for the provision of open access to electronic doctoral theses. The EThOS project team have completed the task and UCL Library Services in partnership with Key Perspectives Ltd have been asked to undertake a consultative study to assess the acceptability of the proposed model to the UK higher education community in the context of other potential models. This document reports the results of this consultative study, including a set of recommendations to JISC and other stakeholders for setting up a UK national e-theses service. The stakeholders other than JISC are: The British Library University administrators (registrars) Graduate students and recent PhDs Librarians Institutional repository managers Other e-theses services including: DART-Europe DiVA DissOnline Australasian Digital Theses Theses Canada Networked Digital Library for Theses and Dissertations The EThOS tea