Tips on preparing and selecting your research data for long term preservation (delivered 20th January 2015)

1. Digital Preservation for Research Data
Tips on preparing and selecting your research data for long term preservation
Rachel MacGregor
Digital Archivist
Wednesday 20th January
rdm@lancaster.ac.uk
Tel: 01524 595229

2. Digital Preservation for Research Data
Tips on preparing and selecting your research data for long term
preservation
• What is preservation?
• Why is preservation important?
• How can you help us?
• How can we help you?

3. Digital Preservation for Research Data
What is digital preservation?
• Back-up is not the same as preservation
• Ensuring long-term access
• Readable formats
• Understanding the context

4. Digital Preservation for Research Data
Preservation horror stories…
Tranche data archive for mass spectrometry data at the University
of Michigan – shut down
AHDS (Arts and Humanities Data Service) had its funding cut in
2008
Jorum – Repository for educational resources – funding ceased
2015

5. Digital Preservation for Research Data
Why is preservation important?
• Sustainability
• Ethical considerations
• Impact

6. Digital Preservation for Research Data
Sustainability
• What data should be selected for permanent preservation?
• Where is the data going to be kept?
• How is the data going to be shared and accessed?
• How long does it need to be kept for?
• How will the cost be covered?

7. Digital Preservation for Research Data
Ethical considerations
• Accurate, complete, authentic, reliable
• Confidential and anonymous
• Comply with Data Protection, FOI and copyright legislation
• Maximise research efficiency by re-use
• Minimise risk of data loss

8. Digital Preservation for Research Data
Impact
• Improve access
• Maximise re-use potential
• Encourage new ideas
• Raise profile

9. Digital Preservation for Research Data
Research Council guidelines
• Varies but acknowledges data with “long term value”
• Keep for 10 years +
• Research data must include metadata
• Deposited in secure repository

10. Digital Preservation for Research Data
What can you help us with?

11. Digital Preservation for Research Data
What you can do for us
• Provide information about your data
• Create useful metadata
• File naming and structure
• File formats

12. Digital Preservation for Research Data
What we can do for you
• Ensure compliance
• Ensure long term preservation
• Integrity, authenticity and stability
• Advice and guidance

13. Digital Preservation for Research Data
Advice and guidance
• Choosing a repository
• Appropriate formats for data storage
• Appropriate metadata for stored data
• Choosing what data to store

14. Digital Preservation for Research Data
How do I know what to keep?
UK Research Council research data policy says data with
“...acknowledged long-term value” should be retained.
Is the answer ‘yes’ to either of these questions:
• Will the data underpin an article submitted to a journal that has
a policy requiring it to be available?
• Will data produced through RCUK funding underpin a published
research output?
If so then the data needs to be preserved

15. Digital Preservation for Research Data
Tips on preparing and selecting your research data for long term preservation
Rachel MacGregor
Digital Archivist
Wednesday 20th January
rdm@lancaster.ac.uk
Tel: 01524 595229