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/

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

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."

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.

The JISC Managing Research Data Progress Workshop was held 17-18 May 2010 in Manchester. This was a great gathering from across the community, and we had many engaging discussions and breakout groups, as well as seeing some fascinating presentations from people trying to tackle the research data area.

You can see our presentation below, or download the PDF here.

A great event at UCL on 11 May 2010 brought together a wide range of researcers around 'Data as Content'. Discussions were wide ranging and was intersting to see how important data is becoming in the world of ePublishing.

You can see more about the event, including a video of the IDMB talk, @ http://www.ucl.ac.uk/infostudies/e-books/

Today we presented our work at the great EIDCSR Workshop in Oxford - http://eidcsr.oucs.ox.ac.uk/policy_workshop.xml

This was a brilliant event, particularly seeing how the univerwites of Melbourne, Oxford and Edinburgh are tackling data management and curation. It appears that we are all sharing the same views on how this needs to be done from the top-down and from the bottom-up to make it work.

You can read more about EIDCSR (Embedding Institutional Data Curation Services in Research) @ http://eidcsr.blogspot.com/

Over 60 staff from across the University of Southampton attended the first IDMB workshop on 24th March 2010. This awareness raising event provided a lively forum for discussion on the project so far, including some preliminary results from our survey of data management.

The lunchtime discussion included a brainstorming session for participants in which they were asked to think about:

- Quick Wins, achieveable immediately to improve researchers data management experience;

- Dreams and Aspirations, what researchers want in an ideal world, and;

- Issues and Frustrations, things that currently work against researchers.

This workshop proved that the research community wants to engage in this project, which bodes well for the future.

You can see what our researchers think byviewing  the presentation below...

We had a great visit by Ed Pinsent from ULCC to discuss our use of AIDA. We are going to use it at School and institutional level to evaluate our data management capability. It should be very interesting to see the results, and how the IDMB project can move us forwards.

Interesting discussion around the 'three stools' model: Organisation, technology and resource.

Find out more about AIDA @ http://aida.da.ulcc.ac.uk/wiki/index.php/AIDA