The latest instalment of my series on best practice in ORDO looks at sharing videos.

In late 2017, we were approached by Dr Erica Borgstrom from the faculty of Wellbeing, Education and Language Studies. Erica’s research focuses on death and dying, with a particular focus on end of life care. Over the course of the previous year she had been running a series of seminars on death and dying, all of which had been recorded and posted on an OU hosted website. Erica was concerned that the website would not be supported for much longer and that the videos were of high interest and needed to be made available to the public on another platform.This is where ORDO comes in – by putting the videos of the seminars on ORDO, they were given the security and credibility of being hosted on an OU platform, and we were able to guarantee that they would be maintained for a minimum of 10 years. Adding the videos to ORDO gave each one a DOI, enabling Erica and the seminar presenters to cite them at conferences or in papers and ensuring that they are recognised as valid research outputs. ORDO allows in-browser viewing of most audiovisual file types which means that the videos don’t need to be downloaded to be watched. We were also able to add metadata to the records to enable discoverability, and upload extra background documents alongside the videos to add context.Finally, we grouped all the videos together into one collection, giving the entire seminar series a DOI and ensuring that they are seen as a complete body of work.

Seruset Borgstrom, Erica (2017): Open University Death and Dying Seminar Series. figshare. Collection. https://doi.org/10.21954/ou.rd.c.3825658.v2 

Since the seminar series was uploaded to ORDO in January 2018, the videos have consistently featured in our top ten most viewed items. They have been viewed almost 7,500 times and downloaded 571 times.

A brief note from Erica:

I found working with ORDO and the library staff very helpful and exciting. Uploading and storing the videos in this way make them easy to share with a much wider audience and helps us fulfil our mission as an open, and accessible, university. The seminar speakers have also appreciated the professional platform to recognise their talk as a research output.

Continuing my series on best practice in ORDO, this time I’m going to trumpet The Robert Minter Collection: https://doi.org/10.21954/ou.rd.7258499.v1 which was deposited by Trevor Herbert in December 2018. According to the ORDO record:

This is a copy of the data underlying the website ‘The Robert Minter Collection: A Handlist of Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Trumpet Repertory’ which contained a database of music collected by Robert L. Minter (1949-81).

Minter’s interest was in the collection of sources that contribute to our understanding of the trumpet at various points in its history before the twentieth century.

This is regarded as one of the world’s largest fully catalogued datasets about early trumpet repertoire.

The website in question was created in 2008 and is no longer active, however it had been archived by the Internet Archive, most recently in May 2017. In 2018, Trevor approached the Library for help archiving the data contained on the website because he was aware that although the Internet Archive had maintained much of the information, not all functionality and content had been preserved; most crucially the database itself is no longer searchable.               

ORDO was deemed a good fit for creating an archive of the content of the website. It allows the deposit of any file type and enables in-browser visualisation of many of these so it is not always necessary to download documents in order to view them. By depositing the material in ORDO, Trevor also obtained a DOI (Digital Object Identifier) – a persistent, reliable link to the record which will be maintained even if the materials are no longer available for any reason. Any materials added to ORDO are guaranteed to be maintained for a minimum of ten years.

Within the record there are four files – an access database, a csv copy of the data, a zip file containing information about the collection, database and website and a list of files in the zip file. The description in the record makes it clear to any potential users what they are accessing and how they can be used. Since it was deposited in December, the collection has been viewed 139 times and downloaded 18 times. Now that deserves a fanfare!

Over the coming months I’m going to focus on some examples of best practice on ORDO. The creators of all the items in this series will receive a reusable Figshare coffee cup as way of thanks and congratulations.

The first series of items I’m going to focus on are the OpenMARS Database datasets (https://doi.org/10.21954/ou.rd.c.4278950.v1) , deposited by James Holmes (STEM) earlier this year. From the data record:

“The Open access to Mars Assimilated Remote Soundings (OpenMARS) database is a reanalysis product combining past spacecraft observations with a state-of-the-art Mars Global Circulation Model (GCM). The OpenMARS product is a global surface/atmosphere reference database of key variables for multiple Mars years.”

Since their deposit in February, these datasets have been downloaded a total of 291 times, making them some of the most popular items on ORDO. This is a fine reward for all the hard work that went into preparing them for sharing.

What’s so good about them?

There are four datasets which are published individually and also grouped together as a collection. The most impressive thing about these is the documentation accompanying these datasets, which is excellent:

• On the landing page for each dataset is a description, which clearly details the provenance of the dataset and information about the OpenMARS project
• Each dataset has a PDF reference manual. This can be read in the browser, and as the datasets are large (~25GB each) and use a file format that requires specialist software and does not display in the browser (.nc) this means that users can decide if the data is useful before download
• The documentation within the reference manual is very detailed and includes information on access (using a sample Python script included in the dataset), structure of the dataset, provenance and quality assurance
• The datasets clearly reference the funding body – the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation programme

Is it FAIR?

The gold standard for research data is that it should be FAIR – Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-usable. These datasets fulfill all but one of the criteria detailed in Sarah Jones and Maarjan Grootfeld’s FAIR data checklist (original version at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1065991).  It only falls down on the fact that the data are not in a widely available format, but considering the nature of the data this would be very difficult to achieve, and since the reference manuals are very accessible, this issue is dealt with. See the completed checklist.

And finally, a word from James…

‘Adding datasets produced by our team at the Open University that will be of interest to multiple different users was really simple to do using the ORDO system, and the team that manage it were very helpful if I had any questions during the process. Thanks!’