Data Management Course Outline

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

For Scientists

The case for data stewardship

• 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)

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 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

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 - 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

Preservation strategies

• 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)

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