1. EXPLAIN IT WHY YOUR RESEARCH DESERVES GOOD DOCUMENTATION AND METADATA

2. Why create documentation? Creating documentation can seem like a waste of time Good documentation will include a lot of information that might seem obvious

3. Make material understandable What’s obvious now might not be in a few months, years, decades… Don’t assume that you will remember all the important details Help others understand what you did and why Explain how it follows on from other work Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/archer10/5692813531/

4. Make material verifiable Detailing your methods helps people understand what you did Explaining your algorithms, search methods etc makes your work reproducible Conclusions can be verified

5. Material may be re-used by someone in a different discipline Provide context to minimise the risk of it being misunderstood or misused Make material reusable

6. Documentation & Metadata Information about data Documentation is: –Human readable –Can be structured or free-form Metadata are: –Machine readable –Written according to standards

7. Make material findable Comprehensive descriptive metadata allows relevant material to be discovered more easily Documentation and metadata help you know you’ve found something useful without having to access the full item Related materials (eg other files) can be located

8. What to include Who created it, when and why Include: Description of the item Methodology Units of measurement References to related data Define: Jargon Acronyms Codes – provide a key Provide: Technical information about the file (may be generated automatically)

9. Explain it Create documentation to make data: –Understandable –Findable (and searchable) –Verifiable –Re-usable Explain: –Who created it, when and why –Methodologies and analysis techniques –Jargon, acronyms and code

10. Open Access Teaching Materials for Digital Preservation Produced by the JISC-funded PrePARe project (2012) This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License