Digital Curation 101 Lite

The majority of scientific research is carried out through short-term, funded projects. Accordingly, principle investigators and researchers must constantly be on the lookout for new funding opportunities to continue their research activity. This, coupled with often limited staffing resources, has meant that data management and curation activities have not generally been given a high priority within research projects. However, research councils and funding bodies are becoming increasingly aware of the value of sharing and reusing data and now require evidence of adequate and appropriate provisions for data management and curation in new grant funding applications.

To assist researchers in developing sound data management and curation plans, we developed this workshop to provide an introduction to digital curation and the range of activities that should be considered when planning and implementing new projects.

About the Course

Using our DCC Curation Lifecycle Model [PDF] as a reference point, this one-day course employed a mixture of lectures and practical exercises to equip participants with both a theoretical underpinning of core digital curation issues as well as hands-on experience in applying the lessons learned.

Benefits of Participation

Upon completing this workshop participants gained an understanding of the range and nature of data management and curation activities that should be considered when planning new research projects, and were better equipped to develop and implement sound data management and curation plans for future research funding bids.

Target Audience

The target audience for this workshop was researchers with funding body data management and curation mandates to fulfil and information management specialists. A key goal was the integration of these communities of practice to share their experiences and to identify where, when and how they can best cooperate to meet data curation challenges.

Please note: This course aimed to introduce participants to the range of activities and stakeholders that should be considered for active data curation, from conceptualisation of research projects through to access and reuse of data generated. If you are more interested in learning about organisational and technological issues with regards to digital preservation, we highly recommend the Digital Preservation Training Programme (DPTP) [external] which ran from 23-25 February 2009 in London. It was targeted at managers in institutions who are grappling with fundamental digital preservation issues.

Costs

This course was offered free of charge and places were limited to 20 participants.