Research Data Management Training Materials

In spring and summer 2013, the DaMaRO Project ran a series of face-to-face training events, aimed chiefly at postgraduate research students and early career researchers. The final versions of the teaching materials from these events are available below.

Introduction to Research Data Management - a half day course

This course, consisting of a mixture of presentation and exercises, was run five times in Hilary and Trinity terms 2013, in collaboration with all four of the University of Oxford's academic divisions (once for each of the Mathematical, Physical and Life Sciences, Medical Sciences, and Humanities Divisions, and twice for the Social Sciences Division).

A hand-out listing URLs of key online resources mentioned during the course was provided.

The course included a practical exercise where participants were invited to begin drafting a data management plan for their own research. Resources were provided to help them do this.

The course was designed for presentation to Oxford researchers, and hence includes information about a number of Oxford-only resources and services. Delocalized versions of the slideshow and key resources hand-out, with the Oxford-specific material omitted, are available below. (Please note that these still include references to the Oxford Research Data Management website, as this is a freely available Web resource.)

Ten Top Things Researchers Need to Know

The DaMaRO Project was also invited to contribute to a series of lunchtime events organized by the Humanities Division, titled 'Ten Top Things Researchers Need to Know'.

Case Studies

Feedback from early training courses indicated that researchers find it helpful if training materials are illustrated using concrete examples from real research projects. This enables participants to have a better sense of how the principles being discussed might apply to their own work.

We therefore asked a number of researchers to provide us with research data case studies - descriptions of their experiences of working with data during a research project. Some of the examples from these case studies are incorporated in the half-day training course materials available above. However, as the issues encountered by researchers vary widely from subject area to subject area, we wanted to provide a range of examples from different disciplines.

Below are three case studies - one from the humanities, one from the social sciences, and one from the physical sciences. These are designed to be used in conjunction with the training resources above, to allow them to be customized for different audiences. However, they could also be used as free-standing resources, to spark debate about various aspects of data management practice.

We are grateful to the researchers who kindly contributed to this project.

You are welcome to adapt any of the above materials to suit your own purposes.

The DaMaRO Project officially concluded on 14 June 2013. However, work to support research data management at Oxford continues: please contact researchsupport@it.ox.ac.uk with any enquiries.