Challenges in Building an Institutional Research Data Catalogue

Abstract

The University of Oxford is preparing systems and services to enable members of the university to manage research data produced by its scholars. Much of the work has been carried out under the Jisc-funded Damaro project. This project draws together existing nascent services, adds new systems and services to ‘fill the gaps’ and provides a wide-ranging infrastructure. Development comprises four parallel strands: endorsement of a university research data management policy; training and guidance in research data management; technical infrastructure; and future sustainability. A key element of the technical infrastructure is DataFinder, a catalogue of Oxford research data outputs. DataFinder’s core purposes are to record the existence of Oxford datasets, enable their discovery, and provide details of their location. DataFinder will record metadata about Oxford research data, irrespective of location, discipline or format, and is viewed by the university as a crucial hub for the university’s Research Data Management (RDM) infrastructure.

Identifying Design Requirements of a User-Centered Research Data Management System

“…The paper presents various thoughts and principles that went into the design of our user-oriented RDM system. It shows how the selection of our metadata elements [38,39], and user requirements informing our design (Table 5), additionally comply with guidelines recommended in literature. Moreover, our metadata selection, being collated from the elements common to over 18 of the major institutional and non-institutional research data repositories, will enable interoperability.…”

“…Metadata. We collected the metadata elements of over 18 different data upload templates from institutional and non-institutional data repositories, as well as those recommended in the literature [38,39]. From these, we selected those elements common across all templates (Table 6) for use in our proposed system.…”

Advancing Scholarship through the Research Data Program

“…These two publications over the past decade document the development of a variety of different types of data and research data management (RDM) services in academic libraries. A sampling of articles profiles institutions such as Cornell University (Steinhart, 2009), The Georgia Institute of Technology (Walters, 2009), Leiden University (Schoots, Sesink, Verhaar, & Frederiks, 2017), Penn State University Libraries (Hswe et al, 2011), the University of Porto (Ribeiro & Fernandes, 2011), as well as recurring articles from the University of Edinburgh (Rice & Haywood, 2011;Rice et al, 2013) and Oxford University (Wilson, Martinez-Uribe, Fraser, & Jeffreys, 2011;Rumsey & Jefferies, 2013;Wilson & Jeffreys, 2013), which illustrate the evolution of their services over time. Thus the data services developing at the Harvard Business School continue a rich and active history and illustrate the current momentum in the field.…”