Tag Archives: data management

Love Your Data Week (February 8-13) is a social media event coordinated by research data specialists, mostly working in academic and research libraries. It’s designed to raise awareness about research data management, sharing, and preservation along with the support and resources available at colleges and universities.

“data (scrabble)” by justgrimes is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Although Fondren isn’t hosting any formal Love Your Data Week activities this year, it is the perfect opportunity to highlight the work of Rice’s Research Data Management Team:

What should you include in your data management plan for your next funding proposal? How can you best organize and describe your data so that it can easily be found and shared with collaborators? How should you store and archive your data? Where at Rice can you find help in managing research data?

Rice’s Research Data Management Team (RDMT) brings together specialists from the library and OIT to help researchers organize, store and preserve their research data. We provide:

• feedback on data management plans
• training on effective data management
• consultations on data management tools and resources at and beyond Rice

Learn more at http://researchdata.rice.edu/

Fondren Research Data Management Team members include: Jean Aroom, Scott Carlson, Shannon Kipphut-Smith, Jun Qian, Monica Rivero, Lisa Spiro, and  Kathy Weimer.

In addition to learning more about the resources available to Rice researchers, consider applying some of the tips offered by the Love Your Data Week organizers to better manage your own data:

• Keep your data safe
• Have a plan for organizing your data
• Document your data
• Share your data
• Think about reuse

In 2014, support for data ranked as one of the top trends in academic libraries: “Increased emphasis on open data, data-plan management, and ‘big data’ research are creating the impetus for academic institutions from colleges to research universities to develop and deploy new initiatives, service units, and resources to meet scholarly needs at various stages of the research process” (ACRL Research Planning and Review Committee). At Rice, the Research Data Management Team (RDMT) is developing strategies and services to assist researchers in managing their data. This informal working group includes members from Fondren, the Office of Information Technology and the Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology, consulting with other stakeholders as needed. RDMT seeks to understand local needs and emerging best practices around research data and to facilitate collaborations to meet these needs, including through infrastructure development, training and consultation.

Recently the RDMT prepared a report that describes data management needs at Rice, such as easy-to-use, well-supported data storage, training in best practices for data management (particularly for graduate students), and support in writing data management plans (especially given funders’ increasing emphasis on them). A small working group is now being assembled that will develop a more specific proposal for providing data management infrastructure and services at Rice, building on current activities.

The RDMT offers consultation services for researchers developing data management plans, which most federal funding agencies require or will soon require. As they create their data management plans, Rice researchers can use the web-based templates provided by DMPTool; they can log in using their netids and passwords.

To assist researchers in writing effective plans and in better managing their data, the RDMT is offering several workshops during the fall semester, including:

• How to Manage Your Data (Monday, October 5, 2015 – 2:00pm to 3:30pm)
• Writing an Effective Data Management Plan (Monday, October 19, 2015 – 2:00pm to 3:30pm)
• Research Data Management (November 12, 12:30-1:30 pm). Part of the Office of Graduate and Postgraduate Studies Succeed! series

Fondren staff are welcome to sign up for the first two workshops; the last one is reserved for graduate students.

Last year the RDMT worked on a small pilot project to bring a dataset into the Rice Digital Scholarship Archive, in the process developing a metadata profile and tackling questions about scope and workflow. We hope to expand our pilot project to share small, finalized datasets through the Rice Digital Scholarship Archive. If you know of good faculty partners for such a project, please contact Lisa Spiro.

As the RDMT develops its services and resources, we welcome help spreading the word about our work, as well as input on how best to support researchers in managing their research data.