Content uploaded by Martin Donnelly
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Martin Donnelly on Jun 23, 2020
Content may be subject to copyright.
Research Data Access & Preservation
37
Bulletin of the Association for Information Science and Technology – August/September 2013 – Volume 39, Number 6
The DCC’s Institutional Engagements:
Raising Research Data Management Capacity in UK Higher Education
by Martin Donnelly
Martin Donnelly is the senior institutional support officer at the Digital Curation Centre,
based at the University of Edinburgh, with particular interests in data management
planning, policy and arts data. His academic specialty is in digital humanities/cultural
heritage computing, and he previously worked at Edinburgh College of Art and at the
University of Glasgow. He can be reached at martin.donnelly<at>ed.ac.uk.
The Digital Curation Centre (DCC) is a United Kingdom-supported
service and center of excellence for digital preservation and data
management founded in 2004. This article gives an overview of the
DCC’s Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) funded
institutional engagement program (2011-2013), wherein we worked
intensively with over 20 UK higher education institutions (HEIs) to identify,
describe and raise levels of awareness and capability in institutional research
data management. The set of engagements involved HEIs from all constituent
countries of the United Kingdom and covered a range of institutional types,
from ancient, research-intensive universities to newer universities seeking to
raise their research profiles to specialist institutions with a focus in particular
subject areas such as economics or art.
The Institutional Engagement Program: An Overview
Between Spring 2011 and Summer 2013, the DCC undertook a significant
outreach program designed to assist a cohort of individual universities in the
development of their research data management capabilities. Funded by the
HEFCE’s Universities Modernization Fund, in sympathy with the DCC’s
core funding from Jisc, this became known as the Institutional Engagement
(IE) Programme.
This work shared as its bedrock the view subsequently expressed in the
Royal Society’s Science as an Open Enterprise report ([1], p.8) that “a shift
away from a research culture in which data is viewed as a private preserve”
is essential to achieving improvements in the exploitation of research. Such
cultural change requires the involvement and collaboration of numerous
stakeholder groups and the joining together of what could be thought of as
work silos. The work does not stop at the gates of the university, though:
research funders, charities, government agencies and learned societies are
all also involved.
C O N T E N T S N E X T P A GE >N E X T A R T I C L E >
<P R E V I O U S P A G E
EDITOR’S SUMMARY
The United Kingdom’s Digital Curation Centre (DCC), established in 2004, is the country’s
digital preservation and data management authority. From 2011 to mid-2013 the DCC’s
Institutional Engagement program provided support for digital preservation and data
management to 20 universities. The initiative was stimulated by the realization that
research data leads to broader advances when shared, as well as by pressure from
funders to implement formal data management practices. Experience with the first cohort
of universities revealed differences in readiness for data management, the importance of a
local champion and support staff and the need for dedicated funding. Unfamiliar but
necessary working relationships emerged, as did the need to align institution requirements
with funder priorities. Common challenges were planning for effective data management,
data storage and training for researchers and staff. The DCC will apply the lessons learned
with the first cohort to other higher educational institutions, adjusting its approach to serve
each university’s specific needs while promoting the shared purpose.
KEYWORDS
data curation colleges and universities
research data sets United Kingdom
digital object preservation training
Special Section
Research Data Access & Preservation
38
Bulletin of the Association for Information Science and Technology – August/September 2013 – Volume 39, Number 6
Context
A number of factors influenced this work, including the increase in data-
related requirements and expectations of research funders, publishers and
the government. At the highest level, the UK government, via a white paper
published in December 2011, has exerted increased pressure on their seven
public funding councils to implement and enforce the data management
policies and expectations that are currently in place.
Over and above this white paper, the Engineering and Physical Sciences
Research Council (EPSRC) – the largest of the research councils in terms of
monies disbursed – has informed all research institutions that they are each
expected to prepare a data management roadmap by May 2012 and to have a
functioning research data infrastructure in place by May 2015,galvanizing many
senior managers, researchers and research support staff to take prompt action.
Other funders, notably the Medical Research Council and Economic and
Social Research Council, have tightened up their existing regulations, and
carried out quality checking exercises on the data management plans received
at the application stage [2]. All of these developments point at a trend
towards increasing regulation and requirements and expectations of higher
quality data management.
The First IE Program
Cohort. At the very beginning of the program, we were able to help the limited
number of universities that were interested in participating and met the basic
criteria for the program, but – as word got around – demand to participate
increased, and by the mid-point we had a waiting list of institutions keen to
work with us. These institutions are now being contacted with a view to
taking part in a follow-up program beginning in Summer 2013.
The first cohort comprised a variety of institutions, ranging from ancient,
research-intensive universities such as Glasgow and Edinburgh to newer
(post-1992) universities with smaller research portfolios to specialist
institutions such as the London School of Economics and the University of
the Arts London. We sought to work with at least one institution from each
of the four countries that make up the United Kingdom: England, Scotland,
Wales and Northern Ireland.
We initially calculated that the available funding would enable 18 full
engagements, with an allocation of 60 days of DCC effort provided free for
each, drawn from a mixture of staff based at each of the three DCC sites:
Edinburgh, Bath and Glasgow. In practice, however, given the pace of the
individual engagements, which in some cases were becoming extended over
a lengthy period, we were able to extend this assistance to a few more
institutions based on their particular circumstances.
Process. Each engagement was tailored to meet the specific needs of the
institution in question, with the DCC providing in-depth and concentrated
support to a community of institutions already known to be underprepared,
in general, to face the growing challenge of research data management.
Following initial contact and agreement from a senior champion, the
DCC and the institution agreed on the key contact people to manage the
process from both sides. In most cases, task forces or working groups were
assembled, and in some instances a cycle of business process redesign was
put in motion. Three key perspectives were encompassed: that of the
research practitioners themselves; support staff from research offices,
libraries and IT departments; and the senior managers with their hands on
the purse strings. (This situation was reminiscent of Cornell’s “three-legged
stool” model, wherein technology, resources and organization need to be
roughly equal in order to keep the chair upright [3].)
It quickly became apparent that the engagements needed authority,
clarity and drive if they were to be successful. Without the ongoing backing
of a senior figure,
research support
staff struggled to
motivate or engage
researchers.
Without dedicated
resourcing, this
work often took a
backseat to other
pressing concerns,
not least of which
was the Research
Excellence
DONNELLY, continued
T O P O F A R T I C L EC O N T E N T S N E X T P A G E >N E X T A R T I C L E >
<P R E V I O U S P A G E
Special Section
FIGURE 1. Developing institutional infrastructure.
Research Data Access & Preservation
39
Bulletin of the Association for Information Science and Technology – August/September 2013 – Volume 39, Number 6
Framework exercise, the semi-regular mechanism by which the UK
government determines how much funding to provide to each university.
This multi-
stakeholder endeavor
led to the creation of
often unfamiliar
collaborations and
assemblages, as
central services
became responsible
for issues that had
previously been
completely left to the
researchers to handle,
and, similarly,
researchers became
obliged to work more closely with administrative departments that they had
been more accustomed to keeping at arm’s length.
Activities Undertaken. When developing work plans for each engagement,
we sought to focus on desirability, achievability and sustainability. We
found that early-stage funder analysis was useful, determining which
funders were most important to the institution in question – both now and in
the strategic future – and identifying the requirements that the institution
would have to meet in order to safeguard this income stream.
The approaches taken to developing these new, data-centric competencies
covered a range of contexts, aims, methodologies and processes. Work
involved in the engagements ranged from developing research data
management roadmaps and policies to identifying training and support
needs to trialling and customizing tools such as DMPonline, the Data Asset
Framework (DAF) and CARDIO to integrate within the existing technical
infrastructures.
Each of the work programs was different, but we found that three issues
predominated: planning, storage and training. Six of the seven state-owned
Research Councils-UK (RCUK) funders require data management plans (or
an equivalent) at the application stage, and one, the Natural Environment
Research Council
(NERC), requires
two versions: a
minimal plan at
application and a
jointly-agreed upon
plan once funding is
granted. The DCC’s
DMPonline data
management
planning tool was
therefore popular
with the institutions,
enabling the creation of tailored and branded versions that incorporated
boilerplate responses, if desired, with institutional plan templates, as well
as helpful links to local web pages, training materials, support contacts.
On the storage side, universities frequently came up against the problem
of providing sufficient capacity for research data, while also competing with
commercial offerings such as Microsoft Skydrive, as well as tools to enable
sharing with collaborators such as Dropbox. Universities also struggled to
provide advice on the selection of storage options such as onsite repository,
national services or cloud services and advice on how to integrate relevant
storage-focused initiatives, such as the Jisc-funded DataStage and
DataShare projects.
The first of the
EPSRC data-related
expectations, which
underpins any
working data
infrastructure, is an
appropriate level of
awareness and
accompanying
training resources,
so that colleagues
DONNELLY, continued
T O P O F A R T I C L EC O N T E N T S N E X T P A G E >N E X T A R T I C L E >
<P R E V I O U S P A G E
Special Section
FIGURE 2. IE teams
FIGURE 3. IE activities
FIGURE 4. Imperatives of guidance and training
Research Data Access & Preservation
40
know what is expected of them. It is often said that it is neither necessary
nor desirable for every researcher to become an expert in all aspects of
research data management, but rather they need a decent grounding in basic
principles (such as keeping a regular backup of anything significant and
making sure it is not held in the same building as the master copy) and to be
comfortable in seeking advice or help from the colleagues best placed to
provide it. These are largely human infrastructure issues, and frequent
communication is necessary to ensure they stay afloat in people’s minds.
Lessons Learned. At the time of writing (June 2013) we are finishing off
the few engagements from the first cohort and beginning the next batch. The
lessons and examples of the first cohort will be shared with the community
via a synthesis report that is currently in preparation, and details will be
available via www.dcc.ac.uk/community/institutional-engagements soon.
The chief interim observations are:
■Universities are generally in the early stages of scoping research data
management (RDM) needs and obtaining benchmarks.
■Few have the effective components for RDM services or infrastructure
in place at the moment.
■Management tend to be more concerned with meeting funder
expectations than with a desire for sustainable infrastructure.
■There is confusion over the sequence for producing strategies, plans
and policies.
■The gulf between early adopters and late entrants is widening.
The Future for These Engagements
With around 140 higher educational institutions in the United Kingdom
and only a little over 20 involved in the first cohort, there is, of course,
much work still to be done and more demand than the DCC can currently
meet. We have, therefore, realigned our program to reflect the widening
spectrum of need, offering specific curation techniques to enable infrastructure
development, together with sociotechnical support, from advocacy to skills
reengineering to organizational repositioning.
DCC staff will continue to be engaged as expert hands-on consultants
delivering specific tasks, but the one-size-fits-all approach of 60 days has
been done away with; instead, universities will make requests for specific,
defined work packages which will be agreed upon by the DCC and a senior
member of the university. Upon satisfactory completion of one piece of
work, we can move on to another at the same institution, provided it offers a
clear benefit to the institution or the wider research community.
Finally, HEIs will be required to demonstrate commitment to maintain
the engagements, and if progress is not being made we have more frequent
stop-go points to enable us to provide support where it is most needed and
will be most valuable.
Acknowledgements
Parts of this article, including the diagrams, are drawn from a paper
delivered by DCC associate director Graham Pryor at the 8th International
Digital Curation Conference in Amsterdam in January 2013. The full paper
is due for publication in the International Journal of Digital Curation. I am
grateful to him and to my colleague Jonathan Rans for casting an eye over
the penultimate draft of this article. ■
DONNELLY, continued
T O P O F A R T I C L EC O N T E N T S N E X T P A G E >N E X T A R T I C L E >
<P R E V I O U S P A G E
Special Section
Bulletin of the Association for Information Science and Technology – August/September 2013 – Volume 39, Number 6
Resources Mentioned in the Article
[1] Royal Society Science Policy Centre. (2012). Science as an open enterprise. London:
The Centre. Retrieved June 13, 2013, from http://royalsociety.org/uploadedFiles/
Royal_Society_Content/policy/projects/sape/2012-06-20-SAOE.pdf.
[2] A special Research Data Management Forum event held in April 2013 brought
together a number of representatives of the UK research funders to enable them to
go on the record about what aspects of research data management infrastructure
(human and technical) they were and were not happy to fund via their grants. See
Graham Pryor’s blogpost, A conversation with the funders. Retrieved June 13,
2013, from www.dcc.ac.uk/blog/conversation-funders.
[3] Kenney, A.R., & McGovern, N.Y. (2005). The three-legged stool: Institutional
Response to Digital Preservation (PowerPoint slides). Presented at II Convocatoria
del Coloquio de marzo, Cuba. Retrieved June 13, 2013 from
www.library.cornell.edu/iris/dpo/docs/Cuba-ark-nym_final.ppt.
