1. Data
1.1. What does “data” mean to you?
1.2. What data do you have?
1.3. How do you record what the data is / means?
1.4. What format is your data in?
1.5. Where is your data stored?
1.6. Approximate size of data?
1.7. Is any of your data intrinsically linked to any applications?
1.8. What is the most valuable data you have?
1.9. Is data of value independently or as part of a whole set?

2. Lifecycle
2.1. What is the lifecycle of your data?
2.2. Where does data come from and where does it go?
2.3. Can you visualise your data lifecycle?
2.4. Is your data backed up?
2.5. What is your deletion policy?
2.6. How do you process or analyse the data?
2.7. Where do you analyse or process the data?
2.8. When is the data used?
2.9. How is your data archived?
2.10. How changeable is your data over time?
2.11. What is your final outcome – data or process?
2.12. How much do you know about your data before you start working?
2.13. Does your data transcend projects or is it only used in a single project?

3. Legislation
3.1. Who do you get funding from?
3.2. What policy and legislation are you aware of that covers your data?
3.3. What sorts of access is required to your data and by whom?
3.4. How secure does your data need to be?

4. Future
4.1. What would you want to do that you can’t do now?
4.2. What should you be doing now but aren’t or can’t?
4.3. Is the interviewee aware of things that they ought to be doing now but can’t?
4.4. Who might need access to data in the future and how might this change?
4.5. What data exists that you would like to get access to?

5. Other
5.1. Anything else which the interviewee thinks might be useful?
5.2. Would the interviewee be happy to provide further information, interviews, written comments, or ISS audit in the future?
5.3. Who else might we usefully interview?
5.4. What else should we have asked?

Comments on these survey questions would be very welcome. A shorter online survey is also being authored.

Workpackage 0 (Project Management)

• Management Group meetings took place on 5 and 19 of January to review progress against project plan and active workpackages
• 6 postgraduate students will form the iridium support team assisting with all aspects of the project
• support team have been given induction to iridium project (context and importance, RDM basics including MANTRA training ‘sections’ 1-3, etc.)
• initial postgraduate workload will be focused on requirements survey, assisting working groups, together with dissemination activities.
• 2 support team positions aligned to biomedical research data will be re-advertised
• project plan with revised timelines has been uploaded to iridium website
• all team members have been invited to take advantage of available external RDM training opportunities (such as offered by DCC roadshows, etc.)

Workpackage 1 (Requirements)

• requirements survey interview script has been trialled with a small number of initial researchers and feedback fed into iterative script development
• a working group took place on 12 January to discuss feedback, plan analysis and arrange support team
• support team received briefing on iridium RDM script questions and had a practical training session on conducting interviews and thematic analysis of transcripts
• support team given task to conducted an initial interview with a ‘friendly’ researcher
• list of initial interviewees contacts established

Workpackage 2 (Policy)

• Steering Group feedback on draft policy principles were reviewed, with the requested changes to be supported through the detail provided in the ‘code of practice’
• a working group on the 16 January discussed draft policy principles against the research data lifecycle, towards the authoring of a RDM ‘code of practice’

Workpackage 3/4 (Assessment of tools/systems)

• these workpackages are running together until a need is identified for them to run separately
• meeting took place on 23 January to progress workpackage
• an initial report will be prepared for the Management Group on 2 February 2012

Workpackage 9 (Dissemination)

• URC has disseminated to Faculty Research Committees
• an invite for Consultative Group membership has been included in dissemination materials
• a University wide email is planned
• dissemination table on project management site has been established for internal and external opportunities
• iridium, through Steve Williams, Director of ISS, has disseminated the project to the University Senior Officers Group on 24 January 2012

Activities in the last month

• DCC will host a North East roadshow in April 2012, with iridium project having a provisional presentation slot

Risks & issues

Risk/issues likely to present in the coming 3 months are:

• team needs to be very clear that the iridium project is not about data storage space and to manage researchers’ expectations
• researchers do not engage or interviews cannot be scheduled easily
• researchers do not give/identify their needs or that researchers’ needs are out of scope
• project highlights existing practice in data management that requires change
• until March 2012, preparation workload for researchers relating to REF14 will deter project engagement.

Milestones & challenges

In the coming 3 months, identified milestones are:

• RDM requirements identified and analysis published, including use cases.
• exemplar research projects identified and engaged.
• a detailed RDM draft policy document, consolidated using the analysis of existing policies, is authored to support policy principles.
• postgraduate students project training and activities management

As followers of this list will be aware, the IRDIUM project at Newcastle is taking a comprehensive ‘soup to nuts’ look at Research Data Management; all the way from scoping academic and funder requirements  through to what policies, guidance, tools, systems and training are needed to support them.

You may also know, particularly if you work anywhere near a Research Office, that come May the 1st 2012 EPSRC has asked that all Universities should have a road map to align their policies and procedures with the EPSRC research data management expectations. Through the Iridium project we have made significant headway here mainly by drafting up a Research Data Management Policy and a supporting Code of Good Practice,  however we are missing an appropriate catalogue in which we can record what data we have and make it discoverable to others (a key requirement). With that in mind we  met to discuss what could be put in place and other groups may find our discussion useful.

To start with we decided that the system we are going to put in place for May 1st will not be a repository but rather a straight forward web-based searchable catalogue of data and that we will only collect information on data that supports publication. We have opted for this measure as we know that data supporting publication should have already been prepared (i.e. confidentiality respected through the scrubbing of data, fields marked sensibly etc) plus we feel that data is normally available at this point for peer review and as a matter of good scientific practice, so (hopefully) we’re not asking too much more from our academics to fill in data information at the same point they fill in their new publication info in our output system.

The main part of the meeting was concerned with which fields we want to use and these were:

Key Information for the system:

• File Type and Format (publically available)
• Size (publically available)
• Location (Private): resolved down to the most appropriate level e.g. file type, drive, URL or repository)
• Type specific  Key Words (public): Free text field, c. 250 character limit to describe the data resource
• Subject Specific key words (public): Free text field, c. 250 character limit to describe the data resource
• Distinct Title (public): Free text field, c 250 character limit
• Creator (Public): University user ID
• Submission Date (Public)
• Funder / Owner  (Either Private or Public)
• Terms and Conditions (Private, available on request)
• Status (public): live, deleted, corrupted etc
• Last Access Date (private): Controlled through Access mechanism e.g updated by Research office

Related Objects

• University project Ref (Private)
• Publications (Public)
• Unique ref / DOI equivalent
• Upload time / date

Access

• Mechanism (suggest that this should run URO)
• Cost
• Our T & Cs (small number of boiler plate T& Cs)

Useful suggestions included; that we should have a change log for each field but that given the constraints there should be probably be controlled access after the upload and that, in future, we should have a method for allowing data re-users to add their own contextual information as a tag onto the data. Plus a very interesting question as to whether we could assign a non-financial value e.g. value to science and a suggestion that we could do that via publications link (4* pub = 4*data). Finally we’ll also look at linking our existing systems as this would add significantly to both the wealth of information held about the data and by making elements such as confidentiality and / or publications automatic.

We’re aiming to start working on this soon but as always we’d appreciate hearing from the anyone who can add anything or direct us to good examples of what’s already out there, please get in touch at niall.o’loughlin@ncl.ac.uk.

Workpackage 0 (Project Management)

• Steering Group meeting took place on 20 Dec 2011 and established Terms of Reference. This first meeting was extremely valuable with the project team gaining general feedback on workpackages and specific comments on early outputs.
• Management Group meetings took place on 5 and 15 December 2011 to review progress against project plan and active workpackages.
• nominations for Consultative Group membership were received from University Research Committee (URC). More are needed.
• 6 post-graduate students have been appointed. Induction is scheduled for mid-January 2012.
• early workpackages are taking longer than expected and are less linear than the original project plan envisaged. It is becoming clear that iterative refinement cycles involving talking to researchers and revising early draft outputs is necessary. Notwithstanding this, downstream workpackages have been initiated on schedule and are running in parallel.

Workpackage 1 (Requirements)

• requirements survey interview script has been trialled with some initial researchers. Feedback will be incorporated into revised version.
• working group has identified requirements gathering methods to include face-to-face interviews, an online survey, and small group engagement activities and will meet again on 12 Jan 2012.
• a growing list of initial and key interview participants is being drawn up.
• requirements survey interview training for postgraduate students is scheduled for 26 January 2012.

Workpackage 2 (Policy)

• draft policy principles have been reviewed by Steering Group and feedback received.
• a working group on the 16 January 2012 will begin authoring a more detail policy document to give practical guidance on how to implement these principles.

Workpackage 3 (Assessment of tools)/Workpackage 4 (Assessment of systems)

• these workpackages will run together until a need is identified for them to run separately.
• they will be led by Paul Haldane and Paul Thompson.
• an initial report will be prepared for the Management Group by 2 February 2012.

Workpackage 9 (Dissemination)

• internal dissemination has occurred through iridium project mailing list and URC.
• Steering Group has identified groupings within University with existing meetings than iridium can disseminate to.
• the project plans to submit a poster to Association of Research Managers and Administrators meeting.
• an abstract for ECRM 2012 conference has been accepted.
• JISC Programme start-up meeting on 1-2 December 2012 was attended Dr Steve McGough and Lindsay Wood.
• project has been involved in discussion with DCC about a North East roadshow in April 2012.

Activities in the last month

Risks & issues

Risk/issues likely to present in the coming 3 months are:

• team needs to be very clear that the iridium project is not about data storage space and to manage researchers’ expectations
• researchers do not give/identify their needs or that researchers’ needs are out of scope
• project highlights existing practice in data management that requires change
• until March 2012, preparation workload for researchers relating to REF14 will deter project engagement.

Milestones & challenges

In the coming 3 months, identified milestones are:

• project plan accepted (with any necessary changes) and external reporting submission.
• RDM requirements identified and analysis published, including use cases.
• exemplar research projects identified and engaged.
• a detailed RDM draft policy document, consolidated using the analysis of existing policies, is authored to support policy principles.
• postgraduate students training and activities management

JISC Data Managment_r2

steve..

1. The top level relates to the Discoverability of the Resource and could be based around the 15 Dublin Core elements
2. The second level is contextual and essentially covers the elements in cerif (notably; outcomes – publications, patents etc, funding; research council grant, person; project team members, organisation- Uni, collaborators.
3. Finally a specific level giving the minutiae.

This is quite appealing as we already collect much of the information in the first two levels through our current systems (MyProjects, e-prints and MyImpact) so the main additional input we’d be requiring from the academic would be at the third level.

Useful links:

http://dublincore.org/documents/usageguide/elements.shtml

http://www.eurocris.org

Workpackage 0 (Project Management)

• first Steering Group meeting arranged for 20 Dec 2011
• Management Group meeting took place on the 23 November 2011 to review progress against project plan and active workpackages
• nominations for Consultative Group membership have been requested
• applications for post-graduate students posts have been reviewed
• project plan uploaded to website

Workpackage 1 (Requirements)

• existing RDM surveys and lessons learnt from MRD01 discussed within project
• working group met on 10 November and created an internal project wiki page of RDM requirements gathering questions
• working group on 29 November took this forward to review formal questions for survey/face-to-face interviews and to discuss timeline for piloting

Workpackage 2 (Policy)

• existing RDM policies from other institutions reviewed within project
• working group met on 9November 2011 and authored internal project wiki page of initial RDM policy principles and practical application through ‘policy layering’ and ‘policy projection/space’ concepts

Workpackage 3 (Assessment of tools)

• this workpackage will begin when WP2 (Policy) is sufficiently progressed

Workpackage 4 (Assessment of systems)

• this workpackage has been initiated by Paul Haldane

Workpackage 9 (Dissemination)

• internal dissemination through iridium project mailing list and URC
• internal Research Office website pages for hyper linking noted and local publications identified
• external dissemination via website, blog and Twitter.
• Niall O’Loughlin attended RDMF7 event on 2-3 November 30 2011
• internal and external dissemination
• Martin Donnelly from DCC joined project internal mailing list
• Poster prepared for JISC MRD02 Programme Meeting on 1-2 December and to be attended by Steve McGough and Lindsay Wood

Activities in the last month

Risks & issues

Risk/issues likely to present in the coming 3 months are:

• team needs to be very clear that the iridium project is not about data storage space and to manage researchers’ expectations
• researchers do not give/identify their needs or that researchers’ needs are out of scope
• project highlights existing practice in data management that requires change
• until March 2012, preparation workload for researchers relating to REF14 will deter project engagement

Milestones & challenges

In the coming 3 months, identified milestones are:

• project plan accepted (with any necessary changes) and external reporting submission
• postgraduate students recruitment
• RDM requirements identified
• exemplar research projects identified and engaged
• local existing policies analysed
• preliminary set of recommendations for local RDM policy principles authored

Steve McGough and I (Lindsay Wood) will be attending the JISC MRD02 Start-up Meeting on behalf of the iridium project team. On Day 1 we will be presenting the project poster and we look forward to meeting fellow projects.

@iridium_mrd

iridium[AT].ncl.ac.uk

The most useful was from Hull’s Chris Awre, who described Hull’s approach to managing data through its whole lifecycle. They have built a “Fedora” based, versioned, object repository (i.e. we’re NOT talking about the version of red hat linux but an open source object repository… http://fedora-commons.org/) that was developed and managed using “Duraspace” (http://www.duraspace.org/). They claimed this approach was scalable, standards based, content agnostic and allowed the recording of the relationships between objects.

The history of project stemmed from JISC projects:

• CTREP, a Cambridge University based project exploring sakai/fedora/DSpace running from 2007-2009 https://camtools.cam.ac.uk/wiki/jisc-ctrep/Home.html http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/reppres/sue/tetracam.aspx
• CLIF, a collaboration between Hull and King’s College London to look at data lifecycle management and how to store research data running from 2009-2011 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/inf11/sue2/clif.aspx http://www2.hull.ac.uk/discover/clif.aspx, this project was also prefaced by the RepoMMAN – http://www.hull.ac.uk/esig/repomman/ and REMAP – http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/preservation/remap.aspx projects.

To summarise, their implementation uses sakai 2.6.4 and Fedora 3.4 (although they also made an integration to talk to sharepoint) and re-uses the sakai resource section as a GUI driver for the fedora repository, squashing the data objects down into a file and directory “view” inside sakai; all the standard CRUD operations are translated through sakai into the repository. The code for all of this is hosted on github. Looking forward, they would like to create an OAE integration with annotation capture on original documents that gets directly packaged up as metadata into the fedora repository.

The main lessons learned were to stay standards based, it makes everything much easier throughout the entire project; and draw up strong policies around what repositories are for and how they are to be used at the very start.

Presentation hosted by:

Chris Awre – c.awre@hull.ac.uk

Useful links/people:

https://github.com/uohull

http://www2.hull.ac.uk/discover/clif.aspx

https://edocs.hull.ac.uk/muradora/objectView.action?pid=hull:4194 (Final report of the CLIF project)

simon.waddington@kcl.ac.uk (King’s College contact for the CLIF project)

Other interesting stuff worth mentioning:

• Chris Awre also made mention of the Hydra Project, which is an attempt to standardise data object repositories structures in order to enable and aid interoperability of repositories.

Another presentation by the University of Amsterdam and Edia (A private company that helps with sakai integrations and also the conference organisers) discussed the Fluor research data tool; to briefly summarise sections that differed from Hull’s implementation, they have create the “Fluor tool” inside sakai that talks to their library’s Fedora object repository and have also attached the Fedora Generic Search Service to a SOLR implementation in order to allow searching of the repository (although they also cited the possibility of using Lucene or Zebra; SOLR is apparently based on Lucene but is easier to use and supports REST, JSON and XML). Their implementation works with sakai 2.5 up and allows a fine grain access model on a per object basis so data can be as open or closed as is necessary, all data streams holding object data is encrypted (unlike Hull’s) and even their backups are encrypted.

Presentation host by:

Roland Groen (Edia) – http://www.edia.nl/en/edia/founders

Casper Treijtel (UvA) – dpcmedewerkers-uba@uva.nl

Useful links:

http://www.slideshare.net/RolandGroen/fluor-sakai-la-2011

https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/CONF2011/Fluor+-+Your+connection+to+the+Fedora+Digital+Objects+Repository

Workpackage 0 (Project Management)

• a full team Management Group meeting took place on the 17 October 2011 to formalise project team roles and conduct detailed project planning
• a job specification has been written and initial processes for recruitment of postgraduate research students has begun
• established project website[1], blog[2] and Twitter[3] account
• written and submitted project plan
• documented provisional dissemination strategy in project plan
• related external projects policy review begun
• regular internal and external reporting: project planning on schedule

Workpackage 1 (Requirements)

• working group assigned to take forward survey and face-to-face interviews
• identified need for a representative sample of researchers/projects

Workpackage 2 (Policy)

• working group to analyse existing related polices and formulate a draft institutional RDM policy for comment will meet on 9 November 2011

Workpackage 3 (Assessment of tools)

• survey of requirements from WP1 required

Workpackage 4 (Assessment of systems)

• survey of requirements from WP1 required

Workpackage 8 (Evaluation)

• preliminary discussions documented in project plan, to be developed further by Project Manager

Activities in the last month

• internal dissemination through full project team meeting on 17 October 2011
• communication lines identified
• website, blog and Twitter have been used to disseminate
• internal mailing list established and used to for project discussions and dissemination of Programme information, together with related projects/events
• extended stakeholder analysis completed
• project reported to at University Research Committee on 31 October 2011

Risks & issues

Risk analysis has been documented in project plan and a risk/issue log has been established on internal project management site.

Risk/issues likely to present in the coming 3 months are:

• team needs to be very clear that the iridium project is not about data storage space and to manage researchers’ expectations
• researchers do not give/ identify their needs or that researchers’ needs are out of scope
• project highlights existing practice in data management that requires change
• until March 2012, preparation workload for researchers relating to REF14 will deter project engagement

Milestones & challenges

In the coming 3 months, identified milestones are:

• project plan accepted and external reporting submission
• postgraduate students recruitment
• RDM requirements identification
• exemplar research projects engagement