What is Research Data Management?

The Digital Curation Centre (DCC) defines RDM as: "The active management and appraisal of data over the lifecycle of scholarly and scientific interest"

It comprises:

• Planning and describing data-related work before it takes place
• Documenting your data so that others can find and understand it
• Storing it safely during the project
• Depositing it in a trusted archive at the end of the project
• Linking publications to the datasets that underpin them

 

Martin Donnelly from the Digital Curation Centre presents an introduction and summary of policies/expectations of research data management

What is research data?

Research data or ‘research objects’ can comprise any supporting material which underpins or otherwise enriches the (written) outputs of research. Research data or objects can be both hardcopy (analogue) and digital, and can comprise of both quantitative and qualitative data. Examples of different types include but are not limited to:

• Instrument measurements
• Experimental observations
• Text documents, spreadsheets and databases
• Software code
• Still images, video and audio
• Workflows and methodologies
• Slides, logs, lab books, sketchbooks, notebooks, etc.