Data Management Course Outline

For Scientists

The case for data stewardship

• Agency requirements
  • NSF data management plan
  • NASA science data policy
• Return on Investment
  • Return on your investment - Peter Fox
  • Expanding the audience for your data
  • Return on public investments
• Accurate and verifiable science
• 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)

Data Management plans

• 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
  • Standards used
  • Data access, sharing, and re-use policies
  • Backups, archives, and preservation strategy

Local Data Management

• 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
  • Metadata for access and use
• Recording provenance and context
• Backing up your data
• File naming conventions
• 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
  • Handling sensitive data
  • Rights

Preservation strategies

• What archives are out there?
• What to do if there is no archive out there
• What data goes into a Long-term archive? - Ron Weaver (5:44)
• ??? - Ken Casey
• Metadata - Bob Cook (4:33)

For Data Managers

• 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