Data Management Course Outline

NOTE: We agreed that the target audience initially would be scientists

For Scientists

Agency requirements
- NSF data management plan
- NASA science data policy
- NOAA Administrative Order 212-15, Management of Environmental and Geospatial Data and Information
Return on Investment
- Return on your investment - Peter Fox
- Expanding the audience for your data
- Return on public investments
Verifiable science
- Tying your data to standards, metrics, and benchmarks
Facilitating science through interoperable discovery and access
Enhancing your reputation
Preserving the Scientific Record
- Establishing Relationships with archives
- Preserving a Record of Environmental Change - Tom Karl
- Other case studies?
What Not to do when Archiving Data! - David Anderson (2:30)

Why do a data management plan
Elements of a plan - Ruth Duerr (needs redo and chopped into parts?
- Identify materials to be created
- Identify your audience(s)
- Data organization
- Roles and responsibilities
- Describing your data including metadata
- Standards used
- Data access, sharing, and re-use policies
- Backups, archives, and preservation strategy
- ??QUESTION: Should the plan define (an) objective metric(s) to make implementation and compliance measurable?
Estimating effort and resources required
- Hardware, software capabilities required
- Personnel resources and skills needed
Some available resources to help with developing your plan

Tracking and describing changes to the data
Data identifiers and locators
Creating metadata
- For your collections as a whole
- Creating item level metadata
- Metadata for discovery - Tyler Stevens/GCMD
- Metadata for access and use
- Metadata for archiving
- Metadata for tracking data processing
- Publishing metadata to GCMD - Tyler Stevens/GCMD
- Publishing metadata to ECHO
Advertising your data (i.e., data casting)
Recording provenance and context
Backing up your data
File naming conventions
Developing a citation for your data
Data Formats
- Building understandable spreadsheets
- Using self-describing data formats
- Choosing and adopting community accepted standards
- Avoiding proprietary formats
Working with your archive organization
- Broadening your user community
- Planning for longer term preservation
Providing access to your data
- Evaluating who your audience is
- Who gets to access your data
  - Agency best practices & policies
- Access mechanisms
- Tracking data usage
- Handling sensitive data
- Rights

Sponsor (e.g., Agency) or institution requirements
Options for archiving your data
- What archives are out there?
  - Discipline or institutional archives
  - Finding an archive
- What to do if there is no archive out there
Data transfer agreements
What data goes into a Long-term archive? - Ron Weaver (5:44)
What do long term archives do with my data? - Ken Casey
Intro to the OAIS Reference Model
Emerging standards for preservation
Metadata - Bob Cook (4:33)

Data Management plan support
Collection or acquisition policies
Intro to OAIS reference model
Initial Assessment and appraisal
- Identify information to be preserved
  - main features and properties
  - dependencies on information here or elsewhere
- Identify objects to be received
- Establish complementary information needs (e.g., format, data descriptions, provenance, reference information, context, fixity information)
  - What complementary information is needed for data useful for climate studies (USGCRP list)
- Assessing potential designated communities
- Assessing probable curation duration
- Assessing data transfer options
- Defining access paths
- Assessing costs and feasibility
- Metadata, metadata standards, and levels of metadata
Submission agreements
Preparing for ingest
Ingesting data
- Validation checks
- Identifiers
- Citations
- Levels of service
Periodic re-assessment
Curation activities
- Media migration
- Format migration