Data management: Best practice throughout the data lifecycle Alasdair Crockett & Louise Corti UK Data Archive, Uni

1. Data management: Best practice throughout the data lifecycle Alasdair Crockett & Louise Corti UK Data Archive, University of Essex

2. The lifecycle of a dataset compared with the project that creates it

3. Good practice in Data Management: during the research project • Importance of raising awareness of good data management practices among the research community • - RELU Guidance on Data Management • - MRC Guides to Good Practice • Importance of a data management plan that is evaluated at the time of application for funding by the relevant ‘curation’ centre/service • - Not yet ESRC policy, but RELU programme (X-council • ESRC, NERC, BBSRC funded) has shown how useful it is • - AHRC applicants complete an ICT plan

4. Good practice in Data Management: preservation and sharing after the research project • Importance of raising awareness of good practices among the ‘preservation’ community - MRC Guides to Good Practice • Also useful for researchers: to have an appreciation of what will happen to their data • Achievable best practice partly determined by funding - affects both human and IT resources - various IT models for data preservation and sharing

5. Main areas of best practice covered by UKDA For data and documentation: • making back-ups • data quality • eg survey instruments, data validation, derived variables, machine calibration, audio-visual equipment, transcription • format translation and choice of formats • archival and dissemination formats: data should be be easily exchangeable eg platform and software independent, • data or internal metadata (missing value definitions, variable labels, etc.) can be lost upon translation; sound quality can be lost by compression • ensuring authenticity and controlling access • version control • data storage • security: network and physical

7. Concluding Points • Important for researchers and data curators to be aware of what data management involves when the other has responsibility for management: • the formal input of data curators in evaluating data management plans at the application stage is very useful in ensuring and standardising best practice • for researchers, an appreciation of what data curators do is likely to be beneficial since it brings home why good management during the project will benefit secondary analysts