Monthly Archives: November 2012

Event report: JISC Research Data Management Training Workshop

I attended the JISC Research Data Management Training Workshop, which was held on the 26th October 2012. The aim of the workshop was to provide an opportunity for the new JISCMRD Training projects to introduce what they have been doing in their projects and outlining their progress in the area of developing research data management training materials. This strand of projects are producing RDM training materials for the sciences and/or librarians.

Here at ADMIRe we have already delivered RDM training sessions for library and IT support staff and are very interested in finding out what others are doing when planning sustainable RDM training for their research community. We have developed a RDM training plan, much of which will need to be sustained beyond the timescale and lifetime of the ADMIRe project.

As well as the excellent presentations, the workshop provided plenty of opportunities to discuss challenges, opportunities, benchmarks, and how to make RDM training outputs easy to find and re-usable. A really useful aspect of the day was the involvement of some of the projects from the JISC digital preservation programme, who shared their experiences around developing training resources. In the afternoon we had the opportunity to provide feedback on the Research Information and Digital Literacies Coalition (RIDLs) proposed criteria for describing, reviewing and assessing practice in information literacy training. I found this session really useful, especially when considering how important it is to plan and evaluate courses and resources. The draft criteria are available from here.

The JISCMRD training projects which presented on their activities thus far, included:

  • DaMSSI-ABC – they aim to deliver work that will provide benchmarks on how to best describe training materials and align them with the Vitae Research Development Framework and digital curation
  • RDMRose – led by the University of Sheffield this project aims to develop learning materials on RDM for all LIS students
  • RDMTPA – this project (led by the University of Hertfordshire) is delivering RDM training for physics and astronomy. They have produced a really useful mindmap for RDM training and linking it to the research data lifecycle
  • SoDaMaT – a project led by QMUL which aims to develop discipline-specific research data management training materials for postgraduate research students, researchers and academics working in the area of digital music and audio research
  • TraD – led by UEL this project aims to produce an adapted data management course for PhD students in psychology and a new data management materials for postgraduate students in computer science

There was much to reflect on and take-away ideas from this event, some of which will inform how we move forward with our RDM training and awareness raising. For example:

  1. The possibility of creating a central hub for RDM training resources
  2. DCC will be developing a career profile for librarians involved with RDM
  3. Big challenges – storage, big data, capacity, preservation, which data will be archived with publication, who will re-use the training material?
  4. Discipline-specific RDM resources vs.generic RDM ones
  5. Develop resources around the research process and research data lifeycle
  6. Map your RDM training to the Vitae RDF
  7. ‘Tiered training’ approach
  8. ‘Slogan based’ RDM training – this worked well for some institutions
  9. Embedding RDM training within the CPD culture of an institution (this is the gold standard)
  10. We need to gather evidence for the benefits of RDM training – benefits from RDM training are difficult to quantify
  11. Must fit training around the needs of your researchers
  12. Advocacy, advocacy advocacy – try an find RDM champions and ‘enablers’ at your institution

A really valuable day and ADMIRe are looking forward to seeing and possibly utilising the project outputs once they are made available.

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