I attended eResearch Australasia 2010, (funded by USQ) back in early November and Katy Watson asked me to write a quick blog post on the conference for the CAIRSS community.
I have to say, this was one of those conferences where I spent most of my time in the exhibition hall, doing demos and meeting people. What was I demonstrating? The work my team has been doing on a repository-like solution for institutional metadata about research data. We’ve been working with Vicki Picasso and team at Newcastle and Teula Morgan et al at Swinburne. At eResearch Australasia we were bringing together library, research office and IT staff to talk about repository/registry solutions for managing and ‘advertising’ data for re-use, for institutions to comply with codes of practice and anticipated funder mandates. This is clearly a hot topic as Vicki and I were very busy just showing what we’ve built, based on the institutional model she constructed for Newcastle. The presentation we gave is available as an extended abstract on the conference site. There is more on that work in the presentation I put up from the CAIRSS metadata-stores meeting.
Form a CAIRSS perspective, I think the most interesting talk I did get to see was one by Sam Searle, about working with researchers on data management skills. Sitting in this session reminded me of listening to repository managers, such as Paula Calan and Belinda Weaver talk about how they promoted Open Access repositories way back in the mid 2000s. Many of the techniques and challenges are the same, with some new twists. The point? Librarians have a lot to offer this process; experience with metadata, experience with repositories, a central place in the university with established relationships with other stakeholders.
The main thing that stuck will me that Sam said (I think in an ANDS birds of a feather session) was that data management plans need to be actively followed up, they need to be plans for action, not red-tape documents that you tick off and then forget. I’m feeding this insight into the the project we have at USQ to manage our own research data – making sure that we don’t just write plans, but we provide resources to researchers all the way through the research lifecycle. At USQ we’re talking about building the planning in from the point of grant application and/or ethics clearance do there is a commitment to keeping all data so research can be validated. The key here will be to use the research data management component of grant income to bootstrap the provision of these services, giving the researcher and the research office some buying power with IT and the library who will be providing the data management services.
I think this is one clear potential growth area for libraries – as more and more research publications are either accessed via publisher sites or Open Access repositories research data is one thing that will still need to be kept and managed and described locally. I know some of our CAIRSS library-based people are involved, but some libraries are not being included in the conversations going right now. It’s time to speak up. CAIRSS can assist; we can work with ANDS to try to ensure all stakeholders are involved in building this infrastructure.
Copyright Peter Sefton, 2010. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Australia. <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/au/>
