The IDMB final report has been published and now all the project outputs are available online.

We have a new project, funded by JISC (DataPool) - which has it's own website. For new information about Data Management in Southampton use the DataPool site.
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Prior to publication of the final report we are making available the following reports:
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The latest presentation on IDMB was given at the Eduserv Symposium 2011
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We are now publishing the IDMB Initial Findings report. This report covers the initial findings from the Institutional Data Management Blueprint (IDMB) project. The following sections are included:
  • Data management audit. An audit has been carried out to find out how users manage their data, and how the University supports them. This is the results of an online questionnaire and interviews with 50 researchers. The AIDA (Assessing Institutional Digital Assets) toolkit has been used to benchmark current capability at the departmental/school and institutional level.
  • Kick-off workshop. A report on the kick-off workshop held on 24 March 2010, with over 40 attendees, describes the quick wins, long term dreams, and current issues described by the participants.
  •  Data Management Framework. This section describes the current and proposed future direction, for an integrated data management framework for the University of Southampton. It includes: policy, governance and legal issues; services and infrastructure; gap analysis, and; metadata strategy.
  • 5.    Pilot implementations. A brief description of the three pilot studies that are being carried out in archaeology, the Nanofabrication Centre, and for a repository meta-search prototype.
The report concludes with a set of recommendations for the institution based on our initial findings.

Appendices are included with the questionnaire, interview questions, AIDA survey, and funders’ policies.
idmbinitialfindingsreportv4.pdf
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Wendy White from the University of Southampton Library Services is presenting a paper on our project at the 6th DCC Conference in Chicago this week.

You can download the full paper here.

6th_international_digital_curation_conference__idmb_final_paper_revised.pdf
File Size: 427 kb
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JISC has published a great FAQ on Freedom of Information and how it affects research data. Thoroughly recommended. http://foiresearchdata.jiscpress.org/

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You can read our latest progress, as reported by JISC programme manager Simon Hoson @ http://researchdata.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2010/08/15/jiscmrd-project-updates-2-the-idmb-project/
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We're hoping to present at the 6th International Digitial Curation Conference in December 2010 - http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/conferences/6th-international-digital-curation-conference

You can download the submitted abstract here
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We're delighted that Dr Simon Coles will be starting a new JISC project, in collaboration with STFC: WebTracks: web-scale link tracking for research data and publications

"The WebTracks Project will explore ways of making research data more accessible and easy to use by enabling researchers to establish links which represent the evidential stages between data, analysis, scientific conclusions and publication."
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We've been working on best practice and a scalable framework across disciplines for metadata.

It is apparent, and has been for a long-time, that people do not like adding metadata to files. This is not only true of researchers, but anyone. Photos are a good example, not many people tag their photos, and those that do tend not to use more than one or twof tags.

There is, however, a lot of excellent work on taxonomies and ontologies, and a move towards linked data, that requires a significantly increased level of metadata.

Our conclusions are that this is a long-road, and that we should try and encourage people to at least tag their data with a minimum amount of metadata. We can then extend this to add value to not only the data itself, but also to the researcher's time. There must be an incentive for the individual, preferably at the time of deposit, or else it is extremely difficult (impossible?) to convince researchers that spending time on this activity is valuable.

In light of this we have proposed a three-level metadat strategy, which is outlined below. We are working to automate the core metadata tagging through the operating system/application software.
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