Blog
September 2011 - Post-Project: Report on 'Benefits from the Infrastructure Projects in the JISC Managing Research Data Programme'
"JISC's Managing Research Data programme has, with an investment of nearly £2M, funded a strand of eight Research Data Management Infrastructure (RDMI) projects to provide the UK Higher Education sector with examples of good research data management. The RDMI projects have identified requirements to manage data created by researchers within an institution, or across a group of institutions, and then piloted research data management infrastructures at institutional, departmental or research group level, to address these requirements. This report provides an analysis and synthesis of the benefits from this work identified by the eight RDMI projects in their benefits case studies, the benefits and enhancements that accrued to existing tools and methodologies from them, and the emerging business cases (as of June 2011) for sustainability being built by the RDMI projects." (JISC MRD Programme Website)30-06-2011 - End of Project - but life goes on for MaDAM - Outputs available
After 21 months the MaDAM team has to say goodbye today. The software we have produced will be maintained, at least for the time being, by the Manchester eScholar Support Team in John Rylands University Library. The other project outputs can be found here: http://www.merc.ac.uk/?q=MaDAM We would like to thank our pilot users for their time despite tight schedules and their invaluable and ongoing contributions regarding their work practice, requirements and evaluation activities. They have been the major factor in shaping the MaDAM service. We wish also to thank the JISC for funding the MaDAM project.06-2011 - DMP Feedback Sessions
The last MaDAM feedback sessions within the project's original lifetime have been conducted in late June on the Data Management Plan (DMP) integration which included ingesting data from the University content management system on grants and grant holders (i.e. administrative research data information).19/25-05-2011 - User Evaluation Sessions
For the final formal evaluation two one-on-one interview and system walkthrough observation sessions have been conducted face-to-face with the two user champions representative for their research groups in Standard Microscopy and Neuropsychiatry.28-04-11 Metadata follow-up User Sessions
Two f2f user sessions complementing the metadata WS in February'11 were conducted to gather and verify additional requirements on the metadata users need to enhance to their data on the MaDAM system. Furthermore questions on funding body compliances, data management plans, IP & copyright and preservation were explored..08-04-11 MaDAM mentioned in Uni Life
MaDAM is mentioned in the latest issue of the official free magazine for The University of Manchester, Uni Life (issue 6, volume 8, April 2011 on page 8).30-03-11 MaDAM Guest Lecture at MMU
Professor Dick Hartley kindly invited the MaDAM project to hold a Guest Lecture at his teaching seminar on Digital Futures within the MA Library and Information Management Programme at Manchester Metropolitan University. About 20 students attended the session and joined into a discussion on MaDAM and the need for Research Data Management and scholarly communication in academia in general. The slides of the talk can be found here.29-03-11 Session Report JISC MRD International WS: Support for RDM Planning, Part 3
PART 3: "4A: Support for
RDM Planning Workshop" at the JISC MRD
International Workshop,
Birmingham, 29th March, 2011 - A workshop report by June Finch
The workshop consisted
of six presentations and a lively questions session after each. This report describes the workshop as I
heard it, and may be subject to error - please feel free to contact me to correct
any misconceptions. The words are
generally mine rather than the speaker's. This is part 3 of 3 with the final two presentations.
Martin Donnelly, DCC: "DMP Online: DCC data Management Tool"
DMPOnline version 2 has just superseded version 1.
DCC engagement with
DMP began with the 2007 "Dealing with data" report. In 2009, the DCC performed an analysis of requirements which
found, not all funders had data
policies, sometimes the policy varied from programme to programme and the DM
requirements were expressed in different ways.
DCC made a generic
checklist - there are 115 points in this version (2). DMPOnline was developed to present only parts of the checklist relevant to that
researcher to avoid them checking all 115 where not relevant. Note that DMPOnline is not currently
endorsed by funders.
The DCC now has a new checklist (Version 3.0) which has more/better guidance (funder specific) and lots of improvements. Martin showed screen shots & demonstrated the tool (which supports v 2.0 of the checklist).
Future potential changes - more collaboration, other output formats.
http://www.dcc.c.uk/dmponline Andrew McHugh: The CARDIO project.The purpose of this
project is to integrate conceptual lessons and know-how from legacy tools e.g.
DAF, Aida, Drambora.
There are 3 core
groups to work with: research co-ordinators, infrastructure providers, researchers (though it's not always clear who the
research co-ordinators are and the project are questioned on this frequently).
CARDIO provides an online assessment tool for maturity of data management infrastructure, and additionally the project has developed a knowledge base.
Andrew demonstrated the tool, which takes the users through a series of stages. It's based on a 3 legged stool model (organisation, resource, infrastructure).
Stage 1: commencement /context for evaluation. Co-ordinator completes
Stage 2: collaboration. The co-ordinator assigns maturity levels, then uses the tool functionality to invite participants to enhance the report in their particular domain.
Stage 3: provides overview
Stage 4: provides the report in a variety of formats,
Stage 5: co-ordinator assigns responsibility for follow ups/cyclical nature
CARDIO will be used in upcoming "health checks"
Q&A on both sessions:
Q for CARDIO: Who is the research co-ordinator?
A: Not clear. The role of "research co-ordinator" as seen by the tool doesn't typically exist in institutions.
Q for DMPonline from MRC Representative: Are there too many questions from funders on DM Planning - are there 5 key questions, say that could be used instead?
A: May be too difficult to generalise at this stage.
POST WORKSHOP NOTE: We discussed this issue over lunch following the workshop. Ultimately, say 10 years in the future, DMP will be so mature that funders wouldn't need to explicitly request DMP in proposals - e.g. c.f. "Is your email backed up?" ... but we have some way to go before we get there.
29-03-11 Session Report JISC MRD International WS: Support for RDM Planning, Part 2
PART 2: "4A: Support for
RDM Planning Workshop" at the JISC MRD
International Workshop,
Birmingham, 29th March, 2011 - A workshop report by June Finch
The workshop consisted
of six presentations and a lively questions session after each. This report describes the workshop as I
heard it, and may be subject to error - please feel free to contact me to correct
any misconceptions. The words are
generally mine rather than the speaker's. Here now part 2 from 3 of the session (presentation 2 and 3).
Scott Brand, Associate
dean for research Purdue University on "support for RDM planning"
Scott's team was partly charged with determining the University's response to NSF data mandate and focused his talk around how his institution had followed up on this.
In 2004, the "Purdue Interdisciplinary Research Initiative" revealed a variety of data needs on campus - this resulted in a distributed data curation service (in the form of a consultancy). The consultancy service has worked on variety of proposals for a variety funders. The service has established librarians as consultants with expertise in data issues, and they are invited into grants to fulfil the "data" role. The service talked in detail with stakeholders in faculties and developed a data curation profile for librarians to gather information from researchers.
The profiles are an "interview script" - like instrument which creates a profile of the data, it also identifies areas that need attention. The tool comes with a manual and worksheet and is known as "The DCP toolkit". The DCP helps to identify the data lifecycle. It provides the management/storage/ /dissemination/sharing/preservation/repository requirements from the researcher perspective, and the report due to come out. In dealing with researchers, the project found breaking data down into stages was helpful and even broke down barriers to sharing.
When the NSF DM plan
came out the contents weren't too much of a shock. The librarians came to the rescue and the VP for research
saw the mandate as a liability - "No DMP = No funding" so supported the creation of a library-led group to work out the
University approach to DMP. What
was needed was a review over the whole research proposal to ensure all key
areas were involved. The
workgroup evaluated the data curation profile, with the approach being to meet
liability rather than worry about making data available in itself.
The Project saw challenges in how to test the DMP tool and gaining stakeholder support for the rollout. They came up with a workshop (including PIs, librarians) and developed a short term plan to deploy a Trusted Digital Repository (it uses HUBzero as a platform). The VP proposal to PIs: use the Purdue DMP (and the University will cover the costs) or exploit data management resources already in place for your discipline; 55 attendees at workshops, covering a wide range of discipline areas and roles. At the workshop, people wanted to know whether they really had to do comply and raised concerns over sharing of personal data. The Purdue approach is based on partnerships and collaboration.
The current challenge is to implement the research HUB. An initial hub is available in demo form to the local community only, though the project still haven't bottomed out the cost of storage. The hub will allow for groups to create project areas, and control access to the data until they are ready to publish. This is part of a larger vision to provide support over the research lifecycle. In terms of the "Data curation profile" - further funding is being acquired to develop this on in the direction of providing a support community for use of the tool.
Links: http://Datacurationprofiles.org /// http://D2c2.lib.purdue.edu
Q&A:
Q: Has the approach taken built communication into the process between all the key players?
A: We've tried to build semi-formal communication into the process - we're now back to the researcher (having been through procedural aspects) and building awareness in the researcher community.
Q: Did you get guidance from NSF when implementing this project?
A: There is currently a review going on of NSF DMP - based on what people have submitted in the 1st round. Users may be happy to share on request, but not have the infrastructure in place to offer sharing.
Q: Do your plans involve monitoring access of data that is made available?
A: HUBzero has some tracking mechanisms and rating systems etc., which can be used to that intent.
Sam Searle - Monash
University: "Research data
planning - Experiences from Monash"
A brief overview of the Australian research environment - No funders mandating DM plans at the moment - however, the wording gets stronger in calls, but in the form of encouragement rather than mandate. The Australian code for responsible conduct of research is in place - this talks about registries, inventories etc., but not DMPs. Australia has a strong repositories community. The Research Excellence Exercise has placed Australian librarians in a good position to be prepared for Data Management.
There have been 10 Data Management related projects funded by ANDS at Monash that are currently underway. These push Monash towards ANDS goals rather than the institution's goals. Monash is a large, spread institution with multi-national campuses creating a large problem. Monash was considering data management even before ANDS came along. Monash currently has lots of people/roles involved in supporting data management some of these roles are soft-funded - gaps in the Monash structure are likely to occur as the relevant funded projects end.
Why is the library involved? The library has a good relationship with researchers, and can be a trusted partner in a way that ITS and Research Offices can't always achieve. The relevant skillset exists in the library and Scholarly activity is "homed" in the library. The library's DM work is divided into: governance policy and strategy, information and advice, knowledge and skills, discovery and dissemination, improving RDM in practice, collaboration & leadership. The Library and e-research centre developed DM template in 2007 jointly and trialled this with a small group of researchers. In 2008 the template was revised by the library, and began to be used for data interviews (drawing on work at Purdue and John Hopkins which had prompted a change of approach.)
Due to the lack of mandates, the DM approach could focus on cultural change/best practice rather than compliance. This turned the template from a "form" into a checklist, which assumes researchers may be new to the topics. The new version has been linked to existing policies and refers out to other forms the researchers need to complete (e.g. ethics forms) so as not to duplicate existing forms. However, the researchers still think the template is too big. Between 2009 and 2011 the checklist was used to structure seminars and used in 1-1 consultations with students. The ANDS project funding shifted focus for staff interviews from data planning to data publication/re-use. Local policy now requires researchers to consider issues in the project planning stage
Now? Planning is a big focus, data planning
rather than retrospective work,
upskilling librarians, the
need to move to tools rather than paper-based system and how to integrate this
with other systems and workflows.
Qs: do plans actually lead to better data management?
A: Monash would like more research office ownership of this initiative. The approach in planning is to talk to new awardees as soon as possible after award. An interesting quote from a researcher was displayed saying it would have been good for them to sit down at the beginning of the project to talk through the data they're collecting - this would have clarified the researcher's approach.
Q: Why/What work with graduate students?
A: The Graduate school works x-faculty - good schools to work with due to existing communication channels. Offer seminars on planning and 1-1 consultations (hope to offer drop-in data management planning sessions this year). The seminars were not well attended - 1-1 consultations are more effective. Hard to work with supervisors - who might then be giving mixed messages. Really hard to get in touch with supervisors as there's no existing communication mechanism in place which brings them all together.
Q: How much work is it for librarians to gain discipline knowledge to understand researchers in interviews - in some cases the librarians had to pin the interviewees down to collection in order to follow the process. Librarians need to understand methodologies, what the researchers are trying to achieve, where the data might end up and how they want to publish.
Q: Why this timing of interventions?
A: partly down to timing - want to get "bang for buck" by dealing with awards rather than at proposal stage for practicality of available resources.
29-03-11 Session Report JISC MRD International WS: Support for RDM Planning, Part 1
PART 1: "4A: Support for
RDM Planning Workshop" at the JISC MRD
International Workshop,
Birmingham, 29th March, 2011 - A workshop report by June Finch
The workshop consisted
of six presentations and a lively questions session after each. This report describes the workshop as I
heard it, and may be subject to error - please feel free to contact me to correct
any misconceptions. The words are
generally mine rather than the speaker's. This is part 1 of 3 covering the first two presentations.
Laurence Horton and
Veerle Den Eynden jointly presented on "Data management planning for ESRC
projects, UKDA"
This talk discussed
the Data Management Planning activity for the ESRC. The aim of the project was to look at the Data Management
activities in some of the bigger investments made by the ESRC. They looked at what centres/programmes currently
do and how can this project could help them to do it better by evaluating
existing practice and exploring what tools and training were required. They worked with a selected range of
ESRC centres to cover a good sample range of examples - covering all complex
data issues and considering x-council funding. All of the centres picked were x-institutional centres. The project met with centre staff and
then picked out particular projects in those centres with interesting data
management challenges and then provided tailored advice specific to each of
these projects.
Some key findings were
discussed:
- Data management was being done but not recognised as such.
- The needs identified were:
> ensure reuse is not unnecessarily prohibited
> establish ownership of data and reuse conditions
>
to make data
formats sustainable/open source
>
help with
costing, DM responsibilities and defining the resources and roles for effective
DM
Notably, the larger/diverse centres tended to give more autonomy for DM to the researchers. Quite often centres didn't know what support available from their institutional IT providers and the IT providers were not aware of researchers needs.
Selected recommendations from the project:
- DM resources library to be established
- DM contact to be established per project
- Centre-wide data inventory required
- Establish policies, standardise practises
The outputs arisen from the project:
- A set of DM recommendations for centres/programmes - which has been
released the web
- An activity-based costing tool
- "Managing and sharing data guide" updated to 3rd edition -
just about to come out
The Project concludes in May with a seminar for Data Management planning and practices for research programmes and centres.
Veerle went on to
describe the activity-based costing tool in detail. It came about as a result of questions asked and workshops
etc. Copies of it are available
online and at the workshop - it basically provides a checklist and hints for
researchers whether certain activities are high/low, cost/irrelevant for them
based on their research type. DM
costs are highest at the time when the project is coming to an end and
researchers "distracted" by new things - there is a need to keep the costs
down, particularly at this crucial time.
Challenges the project ses:
- Many centres x-institutional, x-funder
- Agreeing the technology to use in collaborative research
- Retrospective DM a major problem, and provides obstacles to data sharing as aspects of DM infrastructure not in place at the beginning
The future - implementation of experiences into policy and practise with ESRC.
http://www.data-archive.ac.uk/sharing
Q&A:
Q: Please say more about collaborative project issues
A: within teams and x-institution. Lots of emailing transcriptions/spreadsheets around with assocaited data security problems. Lack of awareness of what would be a useful solution to this problem.
Q: What technologies could be deployed?
A: most centres had been offered sharepoint, but there is little training available in its capabilities. The project trying to reviewing what tools might actually exist - session later on in the workshop to explore this.
"The Data
management planning for MRC project" - Juan Bicarregui from STFC
This is mainly
focussed around the population health sciences data. These are longitudinal
large cohort studies, where the data has been gathered by questionnaires and
clinincs - the data ranges from lifestyle to descriptive stats, medical
information and biological samples. The data has been collected in waves, with data annotation found to be a major task.
Juan also described the "Data support service". This enables researchers to discover what data is out there in population health science and provides a gateway to that data. It makes responsible data sharing easier and also helps the MRC develop policy in the area.
A range of studies are being used. Juan demonstrated an example questionnaire and explained that the data ends up as data dictionaries. He went on to demonstrate the pre-production service (which goes live "soon" pending admin details on registration issues). The pre-production services supports searching for relevant studies - 89 study records already exist. For 5 of these studies the service has catalogued variables (known as a deep catalogue) - 44000 variables are available in pre-production system. 100.000 is the more realistic assessment of relevant variables. The user can select the variable they're interested in and add them to a collection to pull out the relevant data request later - the actual provision of the data itself is dealt with outside of this system. The user needs to go back to the actual study areas to provide the data.
Data management considerations/what has been learned:
- The understandability
of metadata is a big issue, e.g.
follow up questions are hard to understand - a researcher needs to see context
to appreciate the follow up question.
- Enabling x-study
searching is another issue e.g.
was weight measured with clothes in one study, but without in another?
- There's a tension
between open access and consent - what consent was gained at the time? - The
researchers can't realistically go back to them to clarify consent.
Juan also went on to describe the "JISC data management plans project". The aim of this project is to support data custodians in the preparation and implementation of DM plans. It's objectives are to develop DM plans for people using population health data and something else I missed!
The MRC has been
revisiting its DM policy in parallel with this JISC project - so this project
has postponed some of the work until the new policies emerge from the MRC
(which is imminent). At this time, the MRC
data sharing policy is currently out for consultation. The Data Management policy is also
about to come out. The projects will be
doing tutorials in May-June. In
July it will move on to drafting specific DM plans and generic templates and
guidelines.
Comment from MRC representative (name missed) - the MRC work will be shared with other funders once available.
A "Nice to have" for the future - ontology support in the service to ease x-study searches in particular.
28-03-11 Session Report JISC MRD International WS: Parallel Session 1A, Infrastructure Projects, Institutional Approaches - Meik Poschen
This session included presentations of four of the eight JISC funded Research Data Management Infrastructure projects, among them MaDAM. Slides will be available on the event website. These notes are presented (and were taken) in a quite succinct fashion, I hope this still captures the essence of the talks (any comments/amendments welcome).IDMB: Institutional Data Management Blueprint project, University of Southampton, Kenji Takeda - http://www.southamptondata.org/ Team and multi-disciplinary approach across whole of University with IT service included (see website for more details) - goal: produce one framework for the whole University to manage research data; time frame up to 10 years, includes looking at best practice, policy, pilot projects, training.Key findings: good research practice is embedded throughout the institution, DM practices vary widely, DM is carried out ad-hoc in many cases, storage is needed, researchers want to keep their data for a long time, need to share data, curation is not that well supported. Gaps: policy/governance robust but not communicated (missed a couple, see slides). Diverse recommendations over short, mid and long term, including developing institutional repository and a business model; create a one stop shop for DM; provide training. Examples from pilots: training use case in Archaeology; eThesis (UK based thesis binding and dissertation printing service); working with the discipline librarian and embedding DM framework in Chemistry UG courses.How to create a business plan: key thing to get everyone at one table, have a holistic approach; consider legal, IPR, copyright issues; how to create policies is very important towards helping the researchers and making their life easier ==> this then helps the institutions, including funder requirements/policies; cost modelling is a tricky thing: cost of storage and backup is high; identify who is responsible, who pays for it, how does it scale, can everyone afford it, how to make it sustainable (cost modelling & policy defintion/implementations).Q: How does collaborative research with other institutions impact this?
A: very important, also with industry, legal implicatioms are important, easy bits within institutions first, then outwards.Q: Legal issues, FOI, how do those issues affect researchers?
A: This is complex, takes time, but it is tackled. [missed some bits]Discussion: Metadata standards tool: goal is to set up and implement metadata standards for each discipline from a researcher viewpoint, find out what is the minimum requirement, starting with the core metadata=findability, then drilling down. SUDAMIH: Supporting data management infrastructure for the Humanities project, University of Oxford, James Wilson - http://sudamih.oucs.ox.ac.uk/
James selected a "bunch of findings and conclusions" for this talk on supporting DM and infrastructure for the Humanities, first defining phases of research data management, from project planning to institutional storage and retrieval mechanisms, with training runs alongside; two outputs: a) local storage as a service (DaaS); b) training and materials.User community in Humanities, 30 researchers initially interviewed, foster having them think more broadly about data management, they rarely talk to each other, most work alone and not in teams, there is a low awareness of centrally provided services. Current practices on building databases vary greatly, the typical process involves portable storage media and is not structured; media is not documented, in the end the data is quite unusable for people outside the project/work.Issues: lack of technological awareness, poor back-up practice, difficult collaboration, difficult to reuse/rediscover data ==> DaaS addresses this by improving the workflow and providing a service. Future possibilities: cloud support; training, as in providing an introduction to DM, tools to help manage data. [and more I missed] Outputs: data management portal developed; leaflet; factsheet; courses (good response to those).Cost benefits analysis very tricky for training to show benefits like time saved, improved quality of research, reduced risk of data loss, better awareness of DM tools and support.Q: What kind of people where on the training course?
A: Three quarters doctorates etc., one third more senior people.Q: Is it difficult to get senior people attending?
A: Get the right info out in the right way (not always easy).Clarification: courses where about personal information managment and/or particular tools. Incremental: A Step by Step Approach to Informing, Improving, & Increasing Research Data Curation Practice project, University of Cambridge, Catherine Ward - http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/preservation/incremental/ The key difference to other projects in this strand: focussing on soft infrastructure, giving guidance, connecting researchers with another and providing training. Baseline requirements/scoping studies: similar needs on DM as in previous talks: no awareness of what support is out there.Guidance material on managing research data has been produced, all under Creative Commons license, "please everyone, take and reuse the material, just let us know in order to monitor impact". Also practical training has been provided: discipline specific workshops, e.g. for managing Art and Performance data and on Archaeology data; hot topic seminars, e.g. on personal data, IPR, or FoI; on activity was aimed at connecting researchers with support staff and raising awareness of support services.Much was learned about researchers and their practices, their interest in guidance and training materials, about already existing general resources; in sight that multiple approaches are necessary (also see DataTrain project). Impact: co-ordinated guidance/information provision [missed bits] Next steps: policy infrastructure, technical infrastructure, advisory infrastructure.Q/clarification: Advise only for arts and humanities or?
A: Guidance is available for everyone, also sciences etc.Q:: Who is addressed by 'Researchers'?
A: Students on different levels and researchers as well.Discussion on providing practical guidance as a big step towards policy institution wide, how to get there? (e.g. Oxford and Southampton have research integrity statements in place) MaDAM: Pilot Data Management Infrastructure for Biomedical Researchers at University of Manchester project, June Finch [for a more extensive project overview and outputs see this website and here]
Again findings on user practices/needs are quite similar to previous talks: pilot users in the biomedical domain with diverse ad-hoc data management practices, even within single research groups, multiple copies of data, metadata not attached digitally, fragmented decentralised storage, no long term curation/preservation. Implementation of technical system: data capture is/was fine, but storing, annotating, archiving data is a need. Non-technical factors: DMP, research offices requirements, funders policies.Main requirements: provision of storage, mechanisms to make metadata visible, find data, reduce redundancy ==> benefits for researchers: save time, avoid data loss, get more value for their efforts in data management. ==> benefits for institution: researchers time better used, bulk-buying storage, energy etc. efficiency through centralising service. [bits I missed here, also on challenges] - Solutions: politely exploit enthusiastic pilot users; senior champions are essential; be aware where the service sits. Future implications: emerging funder requirements; people knocking on our door to participate.Clarification: valuable datasets are currently on on the top of the list, but probably will get more important in the future as dedicated outputsQ: How shall/will this be funded?
A: It should be a service for everyone - reality probably will be, that it will be costed individually.Q: What did the university contribute and what is the sustainability plan?
A: Contribution: £150.000 for storage; sustainability is currently being explored.Q: Who has access to the data?
A: Access is pertaining to the researcher pilot groups; eScholar will provide the dissemination/preservation end.Q/comment (Matthew Dovey, JISC Programme Director, Digital Infrastructure/eResearch): Costs: at this stage it can only work if it is included in researchers grants, and it would be good to promote that it makes research easier - longer term it should take the direction of having it like email.Q/comment: Research students for example are often not covered through grants, this is something to address.Q/comment: Data gets lost, buildings can burn down and storage devices can get lost - problem is to be able to finance it, models are needed for that.
24-02-11 User Session on Metadata
This workshop was designed to elicit requirements on the kind of metadata users would like to add when uploading data to MaDAM in order to prepare it for possibilities of re-use or sharing. It further touched on questions on funding body compliances, data management plans, IP & copyright and preservation. The session will be followed-up by further f2f meetings with our pilot users.21-01-11 Benefits Case Study Final Draft
MaDAM has produced a Benefits Case Study (see here for the Final Draft) following JISC's intention to "demonstrate the varied ways in which research data management infrastructure can generate benefits for the HE sector". Further work will be done on a Full Business Case to extend this notion and to explore potential sustainability routes for MaDAM.30-10-10 Two MaDAM Project Reports published
Two MaDAM Project Reports, the 'Requirements and Gap Analysis' and the 'MaDAM Landscape Review: Policies, Legal & Ethical Perspectives, Stakeholders and Institutional Settings' are now officially published.30-09-10 Second Prototype Workshop
The second version of the MaDAM prototype was presented to our users at a MaDAM workshop today and immediate comments and issues fed into the development process. Users have been encouraged to use the prototype 'in anger' with their own data following the workshop and to feed back any questions or issues directly to the team.
The workshop was also an opportunity to revisit the topic of archiving and dissemination of research data through the externally facing eScholar repository.
As this has not been an explicit requirement from users but rather a requirement in order to comply with existing and anticipated future policies from funders and publishers the aim today was to prime users to consider how they might use the archiving function in practice by walking through the proposed usage scenario.
We expect that the topic will need to be revisited regularly to build up both the project team's and the users' understanding.
20-09-10 Confidential Data
The team are looking in more detail at risks and requirements (technical and 'soft') specifically around personal data.
Although our pilot user groups from Medical Sciences are working with pre-anonymised data we need to ensure these processes apply across the board to potential future user groups, and particularly to the special case of clinical trials which are most heavily regulated.
A recent meeting with Manchester's AVP for Research Integrity highlighted a focus at University level on clinical trials data and this needs to be the benchmark for the ability of the MaDAM project to incorporate management of such data into the technical design and policy/governance structure to ensure data security.
17-09-10 Prototype Version 2 Testing
Testing is underway within the project team of the second version of the MaDAM prototype in order to iron out any major issues before it is released to users. The aim is for them to have a chance to test it 'in anger' with their own data before we gather their comments and feedback at a workshop session at the end of September.
20-08-10 eDMP
There is a plan to integrate an electronic data management plan (eDMP) with the MaDAM solution. It will comprise a web based interface in the form of a template with a number of pre-defined fields to capture important high level information about a research project and the data it will produce. Where possible these will auto-complete, some fields researchers will need to complete.The completed form will not only trigger data management planning activities by the researcher, it will constitute a (dynamic) record which will aid project reporting, contribute to the evidential trail for the provenance of research outcomes, and ensure compliance with legal, ethical and regulatory requirements for good management of data.10-08-10 Ontologies
Following feedback and discussions with wider groups in the project's target domains the team are exploring how to factor in domain specific ontologies with the MaDAM solution. Although our user groups have not expressed any requirements to incorporate any kind of discipline or field related standards, it was realised that this is a significant requirement for some other groups within the Biomedical sciences and needs to be accommodated if feasible, as a pointer to scalability.
14-07-10 Data Management Scope
The SEO workshop and meetings with other University level support roles have brought it home to us that it is not necessarily clear what 'data management' means for setting the scope of the project.
Challenged to clarify expectations on who our target stakeholders are - researchers alone? Faculty heads? Research Business Managers? Instrument and resource managers? Lecturers? Not to speak of the researchers who cross multiple roles; there is the potential for a range of originally unexpected user groups interested in MaDAM and of course their requirements. We now want to formalise our understanding of the 'research data management' remit and make it more explicit.
08-07-10 SEO Workshop
We held a
workshop for the Senior Experimental Officers from Life Sciences to demo the
prototype technical solution with them. They manage the core facilities
instruments and this means they are an important part of the research
lifecycle, performing a service supporting generation of data using the
microscopes and other instruments. The
aim was to get their buy in and get views from a different angle to our user
groups, without actually gathering direct requirements.
The session generated a lot of useful feedback, including some points which we hadn't previously considered in terms of practical problems we might face with our prototype and secondary user communities (themselves included) whose needs the project may need to consider.
14-06-10 e-Survey results
The e-survey confirmed that a number of researchers use a data sharing statement which states that they will make their data available on request, and this statement has been accepted by the funding bodies. They also confirmed the difficulty that researchers are having with finding and retrieving processed data and research outputs from old projects
Unexpectedly a couple of respondents stated that they have a data management plan; it's not clear until this is followed up whether these will be recognisable to the project as data management plans.
02-06-10 Preservation Policy and Practicalities
Requirements for immediate storage and short to mid term data management captured and being progressed the team turned its attention to discussing how to capture requirements around archiving and long term preservation.
From the user perspective there is to some degree a 'parking lot' mentality about data management being about storage and seeing MaDAM as a single storage place rather thinking about storage in a tiered way, considering short, mid and long term needs.
19-05-10 JISC MRD Progress Workshop 17th and 18th May
Hearing from the other projects and exchanging experiences with them was useful and particularly interesting to find out some teams are tackling the issue of terminology for talking about data management, something we have recognised as a difficulty in MaDAM for internal project team as well as team-user communications.
We were lucky enough to get one of our Life Sciences users, a 'pioneer', to contribute to our update presentation and a give an unembellished first hand view on the real user issues and progress so far with the prototype. Feedback suggests the prototype approach has genuinely helped with generating commitment and enthusiasm amongst the users.
04-05-10 Storage Requirements
The team are in the process of clarifying how much storage space is needed for each tier of storage, and what speed of access users need for the short term 'scratch space' storage and for mid and long term preservation-oriented storage - talking with both our researcher-users and Faculty IT Services to build a picture of these requirements.
20-04-10 Lessons Learned #1
Requirements gathering has shown us there is a general lack of understanding of data management concepts and terminology amongst our user communities. It would have been useful to present to potential users or target communities at the start of the project to set the scene about data management and develop some understanding of these concepts.
08-04-10 Prototype Workshop for the MaDAM Project, part of the #jiscmrd Programme
MaDAM held a prototype workshop on 8th April aiming to validate our understanding of user requirements from interviews and get a more comprehensive and detailed understanding of their needs by letting them see and trial a possible solution for a user front end. Attendance was excellent and the feedback was valuable in letting us know we are on the right track. We also got some valuable honest reactions on how any system we develop needs to fit with actual workflow.