Designing a Data Management Workshop
Vessela Ensberg, Data Curation Analyst, UCLA Biomedical Library
Bethany Myers, Research Informationist, UCLA Biomedical Library
Why manage data?
Tools for sharing and storage
•Box, UCLA-Google drive, IDRE-CASS
Who owns your data?
•UCLA data policy
Best practices
•File naming
•Readme: in-house designed example
•Laptop swap activity (see below)
Protocols
•Best practices for completeness
Metadata
•Definition
•Mapping an example to familiar documents
Funder policies
•NSF DMP
•Response to OSTP memo
Data management plans
•Adapted and abridged NECDMC case study activity
Overview of research data management
•Objective: Motivation and resources for data
management
•Activity: Data management plan, institutional survey
Types, formats and stages
•Objective: Standards, quality control, stages of research
data
•Activity: Case studies, file organization
Contextual details
•Objective: Metadata
•Activity: Case study, repository template
Data storage and backup
•Objective: Importance of storage and backup, best
practices, planning
•Activity: Case study, checklist
Legal and ethical aspects
•Objective: Ownership, privacy
•Activity: Case study, local IP policy, anonymization
Data sharing and reuse policies
•Objective: Motivation, obstacles, policies,
standardization, citation
•Activity: Local policy, publisher policy, citation
Repositories, archiving and preservation
•Objective: Use repositories, understand storage vs.
archiving, data context
•Activity: Appraisal, retention
Background Setting
Laptop swap Future directions
The University of California, Los Angeles is a large public
research university. To test and promote the workshop, the
authors partnered with the Director of the Office of
Postdoctoral Affairs in the Biosciences. The workshop was
advertised as part of their Academic Job Series to all graduate
students and postdoctoral researchers, with a focus on STEM
disciplines. The workshop was presented twice: May 28, 2015
and again on November 12, 2015. A total of 47 students
attended these sessions.
Participants were asked to bring their personal
laptops to the workshops. After discussing readme
best practices, they were instructed to split into
small groups of 2 or 3 and to swap their laptops.
Their goal was to identify the logic behind the
laptop owner’s data organization. A worksheet was
provided to guide their analysis. The partners gave
feedback to each other, and the laptop owners
began writing a readme for their own data files. Acknowledgement
Lamar Soutter Library, University of Massachusetts Medical School.
New England Collaborative Data Management Curriculum.
http://library.umassmed.edu/necdmc
The New England Collaborative Data Management Curriculum
provides materials for seven 90 minute sessions covering topics
on data management. The opportunity to implement a
curriculum of that magnitude is not always available. We
adapted the content of the curriculum to a one 90 minute
session, emphasizing the practical aspects of the curriculum,
and adding a personalized and unique readme and laptop swap
activity.
Feedback
Fourteen percent of feedback survey respondents (6 out of 42) from the
first session highlighted the hands-on opportunities in their comments.
•“Exchanging laptops for partner to find data was illuminating”
•“Useful to trade laptops with another+ see/figure out their method.”
•“I thought my folder structure made sense, but apparently not that
much to other people.”
A majority of participants agreed that they would recommend this
workshop to their peers (the evaluation forms provided by the Office of
Postdoctoral Affairs in the Biosciences used two different scales: average
score 4.45 out of 5 for the first workshop, 85% of respondents for the
second workshop).
UCLA workshop NECDMC
•Provide a choice of DMP case studies to increase relevancy to more
disciplines
•Describe workshop content in detail in the promotional materials
•More practical/applied Q&A time
•Partner with Science and Engineering Library to include physical
sciences and engineering