1. Research Data Management
How will you organize and care for your information over the course of your research – and beyond?
To ensure you can retrieve information when you need it
To ensure information is meaningful when it’s retrieved
What will you want to do with your data later in the project?
What will happen to the data at the end of the project?
Document your data
Where it came from – plus what you’ve done to it
Use the most appropriate tools for what you need to do
See the Research Skills Toolkit website
Seek out the information, advice, and training you need
Available from the Research Data Management website, IT Services, Bodleian Libraries, and elsewhere
Research data management covers what happens between gathering information and writing up your outputs, and what happens to the underlying information after the end of your project.
It includes organizing and structuring information, storage and backup, and preparing data for analysis, or to share with others. It’s worth thinking about this as early as possible. It gets progressively harder to keep track of everything as you accumulate more material – you’ll save a lot of time and stress if you plan ahead.
Does the way your material is organized make it easy to find what you want?
Will it be clear what everything is and what it means once you’ve found it?
It’s helpful to think about how you (or other people) are likely to use the material you collect in the future. What will you want to be able to do with your data later in the project? Are there ways to make that process easier – for example, by organizing your data in a particular way as you collect it?
What will happen to the data once you’ve finished work on it? Is there anything you need to do now to help facilitate that? (For example, suppose you’re gathering data through surveys or interviews: if you want to share this data at a later point, you’ll need to get your subjects’ consent at the point when you collect the information.)
Documenting your information is also important – recording where you got it from, and what you’ve done to it, and providing any other contextual information needed to interpret the data correctly. This is particularly important if you want to share it with other people – most major funders now require research data to be made available at the end of a project.
Invest some time in exploring the various software tools available to make sure you’re using what best suits your needs.
The Research Skills Toolkit provides a lot of information about useful tools and services; it’s also worth asking colleagues for recommendations.
Lots of help and advice is available. There’s a central Oxford University Research Data Management website, which provides information about services and facilities. IT Services’ IT Learning Programme offers training, and the IT Services Research Support team can offer more personalized technical advice – for example, if you need help structuring a database, or if your project is one that requires XML. The Bodleian Libraries can also provide advice, particularly about curation of data beyond the end of your project – including the possibility of depositing it in DataBank (Oxford’s forthcoming digital data archive) and/or creating a record for it in DataFinder (an online catalogue of datasets, which will also go live in the not-too-distant future).
This slide was prepared by the DaMaRO Project (a joint endeavour between IT Services, the Bodleian Libraries, and Research Services at the University of Oxford) and is made available under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License: Subject to the terms of the license, you are welcome to reuse or adapt this material for your own purposes.
Information Management
May 9, 2019
Research Services