Daily Archives: January 23, 2013

New year, new IDCC

A very happy new year to all on the MRD programme and all ‘fellow travellers’!  2013 has started with a shot of energy provided by IDCC 2013, which took place in the deliciously-named Mövenpick hotel in Amsterdam last week (14 – 17 Jan).

A lot of the twitter stream (#IDCC13) agreed that there was a huge amount of information and opinion to download.  This frenetic pace was encouraged by the practice papers taking place in slots that allowed only ten minutes to talk!  A great opportunity to really work on honing those high-level messages, then.

It was very encouraging to see representatives of so many Jisc MRD projects there, and I hope those who were in the ‘National perspectives in research data management’ track found the talks Simon Hodson and I did on the programme as a whole and on the evidence-gathering activity to be useful.  One slight disappointment was having the “National perspectives” track running at the same time as the “Institutional research data management” track: the MRD programme connects institutional approaches and happens to work across the UK, so whilst we weren’t entirely out of place in the “National” track, we probably missed out on some relevant audience.  No matter: if you missed either talk and are interested in seeing the slides, the presentation about the MRD programme as a whole is here; and the talk on the evidence gathering activity is here.  Your feedback or questions are of course welcome.

One of the things the MRD programme has been – and I hope continues to be – very good at is making stuff available to other people.  In his IDCC preview blog post, Kevin Ashley said,

“Overall, I would like everyone to come away aware of the potential for reuse of the work that others are doing and the potential for collaboration. Whether it is software tools, training materials, methodologies or analyses, many of the talks describe things that others can use to deal with data curation issues in their own research group, institution or national setting.”

This is what we as a programme, along with other organisations and activities, do.  Various pieces of work across the MRD programme with the DCC Cardio tool have inspired other projects and areas of the programme; the same applies to those who have tailored the DCC DMPonline tool, and we encourage all such innovations to be made available to provide examples and ideas for others.  In addition, however, the MRD programme has a strand (both in MRD01 and in the current iteration of the programme) specifically involved in creating training materials for research data management, aimed at particular audiences.  These are really valuable resources and have been created to be used and re-used in an open and flexible way.

I was asked so many times throughout the event where these materials can be found, that I thought it was worth listing them here.  The links given lead directly to teaching resources; background information on the projects can be found here: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/mrd/rdmtrain.aspx

(Unfortunately the website for the DMTpsych project at University of York is no longer online.  As the project has not deposited its resources into Jorum either, I can’t supply a link.)

There are more training resources in production at the moment: you can read more about them here:  http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/di_researchmanagement/managingresearchdata/research-data-management-training.aspx

We as a programme can’t solve the issue of duplication of effort in digital curation by ourselves, but by maximising the use of these materials, and finding new applications for them, we are definitely doing our bit.

Have you used any of these resources?  Want to know more?  Let us know in the comments!