Yesterday, ANDS hosted a webinar by Max Wilkinson, head of research data services at UCL – clicking on the link will take you to a pdf of my notes.
I have my own views on what a research data service might look like but I like Max Wilkinson’s take for a number of reasons:
- it’s incremental – rather than enforcing the use of a service let it spread and be adopted gradually – this both gives the service time to grow, and avoids the inevitable problems when a one size fits all big bang approach fails to deliver
- it leverages off existing competences – rather than build a whole new storage infrastructure it uses existing infrastructure to leverage the service – that way you don’t need to implement storage at the same time as a service
- there’s an understanding that researchers need work in progress shared storage as well as archival storage, and providing the former lays the ground for moving data to archival storage
- using a project based approach allows you to garner a sparse metadata record from day one – it also allow the tracking of a life cycle of the project
- there’s an understanding that there’s a definite problem with data stored on legacy media but it’s a separate problem from managing born digital data .
All in all an excellent webinar – I’d recommend reviewing the video once it’s online
As always, my notes, my views, no one else.
Building an archive solution 