If you collect, create, use or re-use data during your research, it’s important to make sure that your data management skills are up to scratch. Good research data management is necessary to ensure compliance with a number of funder policies, as well as the OU’s policy on research data management, but it can also positively impact your everyday working practice. By developing processes to store, describe, share and preserve your data you will see an improvement in efficiency and teamwork and may even spot connections in your data you might otherwise have missed.
Library Services run training sessions on Research Data Management throughout the year, but in the meantime if you want to improve your practice, or need a refresher on a certain aspect of data management why not try using MANTRA? This fantastic online training resource developed by the Data Library at the University of Edinburgh covers a range of topics relating to Research Data Management. Each module takes around 20 minutes to complete and is a great way to improve your knowledge at your own pace. Topics covered include:
- Data Management Plans
- Organising data
- File formats and transformation
- Documentation, metadata, citation
- Storage and security
- Data protection, rights and access
- Sharing, preservation and licensing
- Data handling in tutorials (in SPSS, R, ArcGIS and NVivo)
MANTRA is free for anyone to use at: http://datalib.edina.ac.uk/mantra/
Isabel,
Thanks for this post highlighting Mantra. I just came across your blog; thanks also for all the other interesting posts on RDM They’re a good running, and pretty comprehensive, commentary on developments. I look forward to following the blog going forward.
Rory Macneil