The UK Data Archive have launched a new suite of web pages providing guidance on Data Management and Sharing. The pages aim to provide data creators, data managers and data curators with best practice strategies and methods for creating, preparing and storing shareable datasets. Advice has been divided into a number of key areas or modules providing detailed information on each topic.

Gail Steinhart, co-chair of the working group, forwarded me a link to this paper during the summer, and I’m very pleased to have read it. The group, formed in 2006, has been investigating issues, current activities, and opportunities for the Library to get involved in “digital research data curation.” Thus, it serves as a very useful US equivalent to our DISC-UK State of the Art Review, but also hones in on the specific issues within a given institution, which is what I’d like to help the Information Services do within the University of Edinburgh.

The white paper begins with an environmental scan beyond Cornell, before turning to the strengths and potential areas of collaboration within the University. It looks at the actual and potential role of the academic research library, international organisations such as CODATA, activities in the UK including the importance of Liz Lyon’s 2007 report on roles and responsibilities, the EU DRIVER project, The Australian National Data Service and the activities at Monash University (“noteworthy in terms of utilizing institutional repositories for research data”), and developments in the US including the formation of the federal Interagency Working Group on Digital Data and the DataNet initiative funded by the NSF, as well as recent commercial activities by Sun, Google, and Microsoft. Institutions within the US mentioned for moving forward the state of the art include the San Diego Supercomputer Centre (for SRB, iRODS, and Data Central), Purdue University (for its Distributed Data Curation Centre, D2C2), University of Washington and Johns Hopkins University.

Four US universities are named as pursuing educational opportunities in data curation – Indiana University’s School of Informatics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Syracuse University.

A section on data curation issues covers financial sustainability, appraisal and selection, digital preservation, intellectual property, confidentiality and privacy, and participation by data owners. The recommendations made by the group include the need to seek out and cultivate partnerships, and the need to develop new services for Cornell researchers.

Canada currently has no nationally adopted standards or policies governing how research data is collected, catalogued, or preserved. A new collaborative effort has been set up to address the challenges surrounding the access and preservation of this data. The Research Data Strategy (RDS) Working Group is a multi-disciplinary group of universities, institutes, libraries, granting agencies, and individual researchers with a shared recognition of the pressing need to deal with Canadian data management issues.

The Social Science Data Archive, DANS, Netherlands, has published quality guidelines for data archiving and "making data future-proof." An innovation is that the 17 guidelines apply in turn to data archives, but also data producers and data users.

This article of JISC Informs by Judy Redfearn says that "data management is rising up the political agenda". Some scenarios by researchers are given, and repositories are offered as a possible solution, naming some JISC projects from the Digital Repositories Programme.

This article describes the work currently underway at Monash University to rethink the role of repositories in supporting data management. It first describes the context within which the work has taken place and some of the local factors that have contributed to the inception and continuation of this work. It then introduces the idea of a Data Curation Continuum and describes the various continua that might be applicable in a repository data management context. The article then discusses some of the implications of this approach, before reviewing related work.

This report by the Archaeology Data Service seeks to answer immediate questions regarding cost and to develop recommendations and strategies for archaeologists, researchers, cultural resource managers and archivists dealing with 'Big Data'.

Archaeology Data Service report - Preservation and Management Strategies for Exceptionally Large Data Formats: 'Big Data'

The EDINA GRADE project deliverables, including a report on Geospatial data sharing behaviour in UKHE, Charlotte Waelde's groundbreaking report on licensing of geospatial databases (this challenged the Ordnance Survey view that their data is covered by copyright rather than simply the EU Database Directive), Pauline Simpson's survey or 'baseline audit' of geospatial data in IRs, and a compendium of derived geospatial data in UKHE.