Sound data intensive science depends upon effective research data and information management. Efficient and interoperable research information systems will be crucial for enabling and exploiting data intensive research however it is equally important that a research ecosystem is cultivated within research-intensive institutions that foster sustainable communication, cooperation and support of a diverse range of research-related staff. Researchers, librarians, administrators, ethics advisors, and IT professionals all have a vital contribution to make in ensuring that research data and related information is available, visible, understandable and usable over the mid to long term. This paper will provide a summary of several ongoing initiatives that the Jisc-funded Digital Curation Centre (DCC) are currently involved with in the UK and internationally to help staff within higher education institutions prepare to meet funding body mandates relating to research data management and sharing and to engage fully in the digital agenda.

This paper will describe the efforts and findings of the JISC Data Management Skills Support Initiative (‘DaMSSI’). DaMSSI was co-funded by the JISC Managing Research Data programme and the Research Information Network (RIN), in partnership with the Digital Curation Centre, to review, synthesise and augment the training offerings of the JISC Research Data Management Training Materials (‘RDMTrain’) projects.DaMSSI tested the effectiveness of the Society of College, National and University Libraries’ Seven Pillars of Information Literacy model (SCONUL, 2011), and Vitae’s Researcher Development Framework (‘Vitae RDF’) for consistently describing research data management (‘RDM’) skills and skills development paths in UK HEI postgraduate courses.With the collaboration of the RDMTrain projects, we mapped individual course modules to these two models and identified basic generic data management skills alongside discipline-specific requirements. A synthesis of the training outputs of the projects was then carried out, which further investigated the generic versus discipline-specific considerations and other successful approaches to training that had been identified as a result of the projects’ work. In addition we produced a series of career profiles to help illustrate the fact that data management is an essential component – in obvious and not-so-obvious ways – of a wide range of professions.We found that both models had potential for consistently and coherently describing data management skills training and embedding this within broader institutional postgraduate curricula. However, we feel that additional discipline-specific references to data management skills could also be beneficial for effective use of these models. Our synthesis work identified that the majority of core skills were generic across disciplines at the postgraduate level, with the discipline-specific approach showing its value in engaging the audience and providing context for the generic principles.Findings were fed back to SCONUL and Vitae to help in the refinement of their respective models, and we are working with a number of other projects, such as the DCC and the EC-funded Digital Curator Vocational Education Europe (DigCurV2) initiative, to investigate ways to take forward the training profiling work we have begun.

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This study examines the digital curation awareness and practice of a sample of practitioners from the UK performing arts community. Twelve performance arts practitioners from across the UK were interviewed to establish understanding of whether, why and how they create and manage digital objects in the course of their creative work. Detailed qualitative data from this series of one-to-one interviews about the actual and intended digital curation practices of these performance arts practitioners establishes what they understand about sustainable management of digital objects, and also which digital curation activities they actually include in their working processes.This knowledge is supplemented with some preliminary exploration of the types of digital resources that are sought and used by performance arts practitioners, in order to understand whether there is a comparable appetite for the creation and for the reuse of digital objects in this field. Questions in the interview identify the sources used by practitioners when attempting to access digital objects created by others as part of research for their own creative work. This provides a 'practitioner's-eye view' of performance collections, that is to say the resources they use as collections for research, irrespective of the formal designation or intended purpose of such resources.Here, this enquiry is set into the broader context of digital curation and preservation. The approach to the interviewing is described, findings are discussed and the presence of possible skills and knowledge gaps is presented. Concluding remarks indicate the implications of these indicative findings for the representation of performance arts practice for current and future generations, and suggest useful future areas of enquiry. Bio Laura Molloy is a Preservation Researcher at the Humanities Advanced Technology andInformation Institute (HATII) at the University of Glasgow. Following an MA (Hons) Scottish Language and Literature at University of Glasgow, she returned to the University in March 2007 to join the Arts and Humanities Data Service ('AHDS') Performing Arts team. She has since worked on a number of European and UK-based digital preservation and curation projects and is specifically interested in articulating digital curation to all disciplines of research and practice, including those beyond the sciences.Her researcher profile is at http://glasgow.academia.edu/LauraMolloy/.2 A significant proportion of performing arts practitioners produce work outside institutional support structures such as those offered by academia or other large institution such as a national or regional theatre. The wide availability of affordable digital recording devices has allowed such practitioners to become active in the creation of digital objects in the course of researching, rehearsing and creating their work, and also in documenting rehearsals and staged presentations. Digital curation encompasses the processes and skills required for the sustainable management of digital assets thro...

Incremental is one of eight projects in the JISC Managing Research Data programme funded to identify institutional requirements for digital research data management and pilot relevant infrastructure. Our findings concur with those of other Managing Research Data projects, as well as with several previous studies. We found that many researchers: (i) organise their data in an ad hoc fashion, posing difficulties with retrieval and re-use; (ii) store their data on all kinds of media without always considering security and back-up; (iii) are positive about data sharing in principle though reluctant in practice; (iv) believe back-up is equivalent to preservation. The key difference between our approach and that of other Managing Research Data projects is the type of infrastructure we are piloting. While the majority of these projects focus on developing technical solutions, we are focusing on the need for ‘soft’ infrastructure, such as one-to-one tailored support, training, and easy-to-find, concise guidance that breaks down some of the barriers information professionals have unintentionally built with their use of specialist terminology.We are employing a bottom-up approach as we feel that to support the step-by-step development of sound research data management practices, you must first understand researchers’ needs and perspectives. Over the life of the project, Incremental staff will act as mediators, assisting researchers and local support staff to understand the data management requirements within which they are expect to work, and will determine how these can be addressed within research workflows and the existing technical infrastructure.Our primary goal is to build data management capacity within the Universities of Cambridge and Glasgow by raising awareness of basic principles so everyone can manage their data to a certain extent. We will ensure our lessons can be picked up and used by other institutions. Our affiliation with the Digital Curation Centre and Digital Preservation Coalition will assist in this and all outputs will be released under a Creative Commons licence.