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Book Review: Data Management for Researchers:
Organize, Maintain and Share Your Data for
Research Success
Enid Y. Karr
Boston College+4/*1'77()+*:
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Journal of eScience Librarianship
e1088 | 1
ISSN 2161-3974 JeSLIB 2015; 4(2): e1088
doi:10.7191/jeslib.2015.1088
Review
Book Review: Data Management for Researchers: Organize, Maintain and Share
Your Data for Research Success
Enid Y. Karr
Boston College, Boston, MA, USA
In the early days of the 21st century, university, publisher, and funder requirements for data
management by researchers changed rapidly. Government open-data mandates, data
management plans, and the development of institutional and disciplinary data repositories
have put an end to casual storage of data on graduate assistants’ laptops. In Data
Management for Researchers: Organize, maintain and share your data for research success,
Kristin Briney, a Data Services Librarian at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee with
research experience in Chemistry, provides a brief introduction to data management. This
practical handbook can help bring new researchers quickly up-to-speed on the topic, as well as
serve as a reference to meet specific data management needs they encounter throughout the
data life cycle.
Correspondence: Enid Y. Karr: enid.karr@bc.edu
Keywords: book review, data management
All content in Journal of eScience Librarianship, unless otherwise noted, is licensed under
a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Data Management for Researchers:
Organize, maintain and share your data for research success
by Kristin Briney,
Exeter, UK: Pelagic Publishing, 2015
978-1-78427-011-7
Journal of eScience Librarianship
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Book Review: Data Management for Researchers JeSLIB 2015; 4(2): e1088
doi:10.7191/jeslib.2015.1088
The publisher, Pelagic Publishing, is a small UK company which features works on Botany,
Zoology, Ecology, etc. Data Management for Researchers is the latest entry in its new
Research Skill series, which currently has four titles due out in 2016 covering areas from Excel
to specific research techniques for wildlife photography. Despite the UK origin, the work is
written from a US-centric perspective, explaining US mandates and resources, although it also
includes materials related to UK funders.
The content provides an overview of the full range of data management topics with short,
well-organized sections on: data lifecycle, data management planning, documenting and
organizing data, preparing data for analysis, handling data security and sensitive data, backing
up, storing, preserving data, and finally data sharing and reuse. Each chapter is well
summarized at the end.
The tone of this book is encouraging, with various best practices presented in a positive light
for the researcher, rather than just as mandated drudgery and useless paperwork. It has a
conversational style and engaging examples. Briney makes data management seem very
manageable. She takes complex topics which may not have been part of a researcher’s
educational background, for instance, encrypting sensitive data via encryption algorithms and
encryption keys, and explains them clearly and briefly. The text is broken up frequently by
figures and bulleted lists. There is a strong emphasis on the importance of thinking through
data management at the outset of a project, whether a data management plan is required or
not; the author goes so far as to share a plan she created for the development of the book as a
case study.
One potential use for this book would be to serve as a textbook to support the credit-bearing
data management courses which are cropping up in graduate programs. While much of the
information covered in this work is freely available on the internet, a print book may appeal to
some learning styles, and the author’s work in compiling the information into a single readable,
and well-organized format make it a valuable resource. Managing and Sharing Research Data:
A Guide to Good Practice by Louise Conti et al. (Sage 2014) is very similar in coverage and
purpose, but written in a more formal style. Managing Research Data, Magdalena Getler, ed.
(Facet Publishing 2012) focuses more on the underlying premises and less on the nuts and
bolts aspects of data management, an area where Briney’s work excels. Data management is
an evolving field, with rapidly changing technologies and government policies; so while the
general concepts will remain valid, and the content is current at the time of publication, the
details and examples Briney gives may become obsolete in a matter of a few years.
Although the scope defined in the title suggests this is solely a work for those actively engaged
in managing their own research, Data Management for Researchers will potentially be useful in
bringing new (or newly re-assigned) librarians who need to work in liaison roles with
researchers or teach instruction sessions, get up-to-speed on data management concepts and
best practices quickly. JeSLIB readers will appreciate that Briney finds opportunities
throughout the book to highlight and promote the role that academic librarians play in research
data management in several sections, encouraging researchers to seek out librarians at their
institutions for assistance and advice in the areas of metadata, choosing appropriate data
repositories, and finding data for reuse.
Journal of eScience Librarianship
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Book Review: Data Management for Researchers JeSLIB 2015; 4(2): e1088
doi:10.7191/jeslib.2015.1088
At 191 pages including an extensive bibliography, Data Management for Researchers can be
quickly read, and at the list price of $41.99, it is a fairly good value. Hardcover and Kindle
versions are also available. It is recommended for academic library collections, graduate
students, faculty, and librarians.
Disclosure
The author reports no conflicts of interest.
References
Corti, Louise, Veerle Van den Eynden, Libby Bishop and Matthew Woollard. 2014.
Managing and Sharing Research Data: A Guide to Good Practice. New York: SAGE.
https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/managing-and-sharing-research-data/book240297
Pryor, Graham, editor. 2012. Managing Research Data. UK: Facet Publishing.
http://www.facetpublishing.co.uk/title.php?id=047562#.VnMm7vkrKHs
