Day 5 - Research Data Management Continued.

Day 5 - Research Data Management Continued.

Today we will continue looking at Research data management(RDM). We will go more in-depth than yesterday as we will be looking at the entire data life cycle, from start to finish.

The day started out with a short introduction and agenda of the day. We then watched a short video on why data management is important and the different forms of data. After the video we wrote a short quiz about the video and data management.

After we came back from our tea break we started by going through the generic research process and all of its steps. We were taught what the main role of a librarian is and how they manage data. “Bottom line … we (librarians) are in the ‘post-operative’ business! We take care of ‘data patients’ so that they can have a ‘long and useful research life’!” was the conclusion that was made on what librarians do.

We also went through the Research Data Lifecycle, that can be seen above. We went through each of the steps, what they mean, why they are needed and how they are relevant to data management. We focused on creating the data, which mainly consists of gathering the data through different means like questioners, etc. We went over the importance of ethics whilst gathering data and how to ethically gather and process data so that no sensitive information is illegally used or disclosed. After data creation we focused on how to process the data in a manner that will make analysing it easier. This consisted of removing irrelevant data and entries. You will usually save the processed data in the form of a spreadsheet as it will simplify the analysis process. After you have finished processing the data you start with analysing the data in order to calculate your findings and come to a conclusion. When you are finished analysing the data it is important to preserve the data as proof of where you came up with your conclusions. You have to make sure to have secure access management so that your data stays secure and to ensure that the integrity of the dataset is not compromised. This is important for the last step as data will sometimes be reused, either for the same research or different research, and it is vital for a dataset’s integrity to be stay intact, otherwise the data is useless.

After we were done with the lecture we were given an exercise where we had to repurpose a dataset and restructure the old dataset so that it is relevant to our research. After that we had to create a DMP for our dataset. We then had to change the dataset so that it only contains the data that we need and we had to make a log file that contains all the changes made to the dataset. After we were done modifying the dataset we had to upload it to a secure repository for preservation and storage purposes.

All in all, today was an eventful and informative day and a good way to finish our first week of the learning program. I look forward to what we will learn when we come back next week Tuesday.