Engaging with students and researchers: the case of the social sciences. Examples from the UK Data Service

1. Engaging with students and
researchers: the case of the
social sciences
Louise Corti
Collections Development and Producer Relations
UK Data Service
University of Essex
CILIP Executive Briefing on RDM
London
20 May 2014

2. What is the UK Data Service?
• a comprehensive resource funded by the
Economic and Social Research Council
(ESRC)
• a single point of access to a wide range of
digital research data
• facilitate high quality social and economic
research and education
• offer support, training and guidance
throughout the data lifecycle

3. What does the UK Data Service do?
• put together a collection of the most valuable data and
enhance these over time
• preserve data in the long term for future research
purposes
• make the data and documentation available for reuse
• provide support and training for data creators and users
• provide information about how data are used
• offer easy access through website

4. UK Data Service
ukdataservice.ac.uk
Integrates ESDS, Survey
Question Bank and
Census.ac.uk

5. Data access
• web access to data and metadata
• data are freely available for use by all. Charges may
apply for commercial use.
• data available under 3 access levels:
OPEN, SAFEGUARDED, CONTROLLED
• data supplied in a variety of formats
• statistical package formats (e.g. SPSS, Stata)
• databases and spreadsheets
• word processed documents, PDF documents etc.
• some data available via instant data browsing

6. Online instant data browsing
Nesstar social surveys
UKDS.stat aggregate global indicators
(some restrictions to HE/FE)
InFUSE aggregate census data
QualiBank qualitative data
APIs are coming soon!

7. Nesstar: GHS - Age started smoking

8. Nesstar: mapping OLS 2013

9. Rich resource discovery
discover.ukdataservice.ac.uk/

10. User support and resources
• help desk, individual user support
• promotional events/ workshops / webinars
• video introductions and tutorials
• user guides/ thematic guides
• case studies of use
• teaching data and resources, often co-created
• education and support on creating and managing
data

11. Some statistics about our Service
Data for research and teaching purposes, used in all
sectors and by many different disciplines
• 6,000 datasets in the collection
• 400 new datasets and new editions added within
last 12 months
• 25,000 registered users
• 60,000 downloads worldwide per annum
• 4000+ user support queries per annum
• many queries from ESRC award holders

12. Sister data archives

13. Adapted OAIS Functional Model (ISO 14721)
Pre-Ingest
Access
(Data)
(Support)

14. UK Data Archive - digital data preservation
• operate in-house curation and preservation services
• offer self-upload data facility through ReShare
• certified to ISO27001 for Information Security
• Data Seal of Approval (DSA) accredited
• undertake long-term data curation and preservation
• deeply involved in international preservation planning and
accreditation activities
www.data-archive.ac.uk/curate

15. Supporting researchers in RDM and sharing
• Significant experience of supporting research data creators of
social science data and related disciplines
• Our best practice approaches to making data shareable are
based on:
• challenges faced by researchers in preparing and sharing data
• our own handling of research data – quantitative and qualitative
• Various dedicated grants to produce support materials
• RELU-DSS Cross-council Research Programme
• JISC MRD I: ESRC Research Centres
• ESRC Researcher Development Initiative
• JISC MRD II: Essex infrastructure

16. ESRC Research Data Policy support
• UK Data Archive co-developed the Data Policy for the
ESRC in 1995
• UK Data Archive/Service operationalise the Policy
• guidance and advice service for jes-applicants
• training for data creators. Some areas need more focus,
e.g. ethics, confidentiality, security
• monitor compliance and trouble-shoot ‘difficult’ data
sharing issues
• archive and provide access to ESRC data at Essex

17. Wider advice and training
• Grant applicants
• Grant and DMP reviewers
• Award holders
• Data managers and centre
administrators
• Increasingly research administrators,
ARMA members
• Repository administrators and managers

18. Pedagogical approach
• Guidance must speak the language of research - written by
researchers for researchers
• Authors all experiences researchers with post graduate
degrees in social sciences /humanities
• Light weight applied introductions from a social science
researcher perspective
• Grounded exercises
• using realistic scenarios and real-life projects and data
• some individual, some group work
• must try to make dull bits fun!

19. Main areas
• The importance of managing and sharing research data
• The research data lifecycle
• Research data management planning
• Documenting and providing context for data
• Formatting and organizing data
• Storing and transferring data
• Legal and ethical issues in sharing data
• Rights relating to research data
• Collaborative research: strategies for research teams and research managers
• Making use of other people’s research data: opportunities and limitations
• Publishing and citing research data
•

20. Popular workshop topics for researchers
• Data management plans
• Legal and ethical aspects of managing and sharing
confidential research data
• Developing agreements for obtaining informed consent
• Anonymisation techniques and access regulations
• Contextualising and describing research data

21. Discussion: research scenario
Climate change research on the public understanding of climate change and associated
risks. Understanding what people think about climate change is important for developing
better communication and dialogue between the science community, policy makers and the
public.
Research consists of:
• online survey with 2000 invited members of the public to assess their understanding of
climate change and climate change risks, as well as their sources of information
• interviews with 20 key stakeholders in climate policy and science communication
• qualitative content analysis of secondary data taken from newspapers and popular
science journals, evaluating reporting about climate change in the media
• Data resulting from the online survey will be transferred to SPSS for analysis.
• Interviews will be audio-recorded, stored in MP3, then transcribed into MS Word by a
professional transcriber. Transcripts will be imported into NVivo for content analysis.
• Secondary textual data from newspapers and journals will be copied/pasted as MS Word
(if digital) or scanned as TIFF (if hardcopy) and imported into NVivo for content analysis.
Task: plan and cost data management

23. The adapting landscape
• Established UK discipline-specific Data Centres, some
funded by major funders, e.g. ESRC, NERC supporting
their Research Data Policies
• Growing number of local institutional data management
policies and data repositories
• New Jisc infrastructure role
• How do these all play together to maximise investment?

24. Data sharing - a shared responsibility
• Funders: provide policies, mandates and some
infrastructure funding. How to cost longer term curation
• Funded researchers: create, manage and use data
• Departments/centres: provide local support and some
infrastructure
• Institutions: provide a supporting framework
• grant-application and funding support
• research integrity framework
• IT and data storage facilities
• Data management guidance and training
• Clarify roles and responsibilities early on

25. Division of labour and partnership
• Where do research data funded by ESRC data go? Data
Policy specifies UK Data Service but local maybe more
suitable
• (Some) institutions want to hold long-tail data
• very low use of long-tail data – cost benefit analysis
• huge investment in data infrastructure by a few
• none by others – looking for shared services/ economies of
scale
• Possible forthcoming period of confusion for award
holders!
• Jisc Research Data Registry could help resource
discovery

26. Wider approaches – research focussed
• Develop practical strategies to embed data management
and sharing into research practices
• Offer tried and tested shared tools and templates
• Data centres offer disciplinary training, resources and
bespoke advice - roadshows
• Shared Repository infrastructure services for smaller
HEIs. Consortia or Jisc?

27. Areas where IRs most likely need help
• Appraising social science data
• why are you keeping these data? Appraisal tool
• how much effort to ingest and provide access to?
• Quality assessment of social science data
• disclosure review - anonymisation or controlled access?
• data integrity, formats and data documentation
• metadata creation and quality – DDI compatible
• RECs on research ethics, disclosure prior to collection
• Research Offices – costing data management and archiving, help with
complex DMPs
• In house preservation or contracted out
• ‘Trusted Digital Repository’, Data Seal of Approval
• Archivum-type services

28. How to cost RDM ?

29. Our data management costing tool

30. Low cost repository solution - Eprints and
ReCollect
• Easy to deploy and free, yet full featured solution
• EPrints with the ReCollect plugin installed
• plugin transforms EPrints vanilla into data repository with one
click
• standards-compliant metadata, redesigned for presenting
complex collections
• developed by Jisc Research Data @Essex project, but now a
community project
• download via EPrints install or http://bazaar.eprints.org/280/

31. Eprints and ReCollect in use
• UK Data Service ReShare
• University of Glasgow
• University of Leeds
• University of Southampton
• Goldsmiths, University of London
• London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
• University of East London
• Western Balkan countries (shared infrastructure)
• Public version of underlying metadata profile

32. http://reshare.ukdataservice.ac.uk/
• A self deposit repository for publishing data from social
science research (and related disciplines), within scope of our
Collections Development Policy
• The pathway for ESRC project data offered to UK Data
Service
• Harvest grant info from RCUK Gateway to Research
• Checks carried out by a repository admin before data
published
• Choice of licences
ESRC UK Data Service ReShare

34. A quality stamp for ESRC data?
• We advocate a ‘quality stamp’ for ESRC-funded social
science data that has been processed according to data
archival standards
• Data Review for ReShare collections
• Who does the QA?
• role of the repository manager is crucial
• users rating system – useful?
• Will be looking for partners to trial Data Review protocol
• Roll out guidance/ training and showcase ‘awards’

35. Questions
Contact details
datasharing@ukdataservice.ac.uk
http://ukdataservice.ac.uk/manage-data.aspx