The value of video in getting the RDM message across

Training is one of the key elements in the JISC Managing Research Data Programme. Ensuring that those involved in all stages of the research lifecycle are up to speed and aware of their responsibilities is a big undertaking. Although 5 new projects have recently been funded to create high quality training materials, improving institutional training for researchers and support staff is something all institutions need to be committed to.


Someone recently contacted the DCC interested in knowing whether we will be streaming our forthcoming London Roadshow. It’s unlikely that we will, but this led to an internal discussion on what video resources are currently available for those wanting to know more about aspects Research Data Management (RDM). Video footage can be a great way to learn more about a subject. It is often freely available, accessible to all and can be watched in your own time. Not only that but video can be embedded into training, both online and offline.

 Here’s a quick tour of some of the video footage currently available:


Recordings of Workshops/Events

Many workshops and conferences are now live streamed or recorded. Most sessions from this year’s Open Reposititories conference held in Edinburgh were videoed and the Research Data Management and Infrastructure session consists of three talks from international speakers. There were also some interesting talks in the Repo Fringe. This summer the Open Knowledge (OK) Festival in Helsinki offered lots of interesting sessions including one on Immediate Access to Raw Data from Experiments.
 

The recent Kaptur workshop on Tackling Visual Arts as Research Data will be releasing videos of all the sessions shortly and the National Science Foundation workshop on Research With Borders: Data Management and Federal Funding - What Researchers Need to Know might also be of interest.



The DCC endeavours to make talks from it’s annual International Digital Curation Conference available and you can find presentations from IDCC11 and IDCC10 online. Previous year’s talks can also be seen by browsing the UKOLN Vimeo account. 

Webinars

While conferences and workshops are more geared towards attendees who physically attend, Webinars are online events, accessible virtually. Some contain video footage while some are just slides or screen shots with voice over. If you want to interact with the speaker (by asking questions and making comments) you need to participate when the event is scheduled, but many webinars and webcasts are released afterwards for people to watch. 



The Australian National Data Service (ANDS) have just run a series of webinars around data management 
which can be accessed from the ANDS YouTube Channel and the American Library Association (ALA) have made available a webinar on standards to manage data sets and how to handle data sets for publication. Closer to home the UK Data Archive (UKDA) often participate in Webinars, for example they presented about their experiences of assigning DOIs using DataCite in a webinar on Data Identifiers organised by JISC earlier this year. JISC also ran a very popular webinar late last year on Meeting the research data challenge; it is worth keeping an eye on their webinar page for future events. Other possible webinar providers include the Open Planets Foundation and the National Information Standards Organization (NISO). For NISO events there is usually a cost involved, although webinars can then be shown to groups of people within an organisation.

If you’d like to try out a webinar there are a couple of interesting events coming up as part of open access week. On 24th October Open Exeter will host a Managing research data for the social sciences webinar with the UKDA and if you want to find out more about funder policies, the Repository Support Project (RSP) will be leading discussion about Open Access and the UK funders' policies. The RSP also make previous webinars available, for example a webinar co-sponsored by the NECOBELAC project (Network of Collaboration Between Europe and Latin American-Caribbean Countries) and the Repositories Support Project (RSP) aims to promote and foster repositories development in Europe and Latin America, others can be found on the RSP Events page.

Short Videos

As well as events and webinars, there are videos available that have been made by institutions or organisations to illustrate aspects of RDM. Some of these are more in depth, such as the documentary on Managing Research Data created by the DCC, while others are short interviews or 'talking heads'.

While creating their online training materials the MANTRA project filmed a series of data management videos covering areas such as data loss, data management planning, challenges of qualitative data and data management policy. Details of the videos are available from the MANTRA acknowledgements page or from the Edinburgh University Data Library YouTube Channel. The University of Glasgow and the University of Cambridge also have a series of data management videos available, created as part of their Incremental project work. Other YouTube channels that may be of interest are JISC Netskills and the UKDA. The New York University (NYU) Health Sciences Libraries Data Sharing series is also really helpful, it is a series of animations looking at why researchers might want to share.

We'll end with an excellent resource created by Marie-Therese Gramstadt from the Kaptur project: a Pinterest board of Research Data Management videos. Marie-Therese has also created a board for training materials, doubly useful!



Are there any current videos or webinars that you feel we should have mentioned? Please do comment below.