Progress update: February 2012

Progress update: February 2012

On Thursday 2 February 2012, we got together for a project team meeting, so leading on from that, here’s a brief progress report:

• As we’re starting to get a number of requests for help specifically related to research data management, we agreed to set up a queue on RT (Request Tracker, our support ticket tracking system) to deal with these; this will give users a single point of contact and allow us to measure the volume and type of incoming queries and our capacity to deal with them;
• The university’s data management web page has been updated and tweaked to provide a more useful experience until we have fully redeveloped that area of the website;
• Project start up (Work Package 1) is now complete;
• We are currently recruiting participants for a CARDIO survey to assess perceptions of our current data management infrastructure and capacity; it’s likely we’ll be following this up by interviewing selected respondents; (WP2 Requirements analysis)
• Work has begun on our Roadmap for submission to EPSRC; (WP3.1 Implementation plan/roadmap)
• Neil Beagrie is making good progress with interviewing stakeholders for the business case; (WP3.2 Sustainability and business model)
• We will be running a hybrid training session and focus group on data management planning (DMP) with second-year DTC students in mid February; we are also planning how we can get feedback on DMPonline from students in the Centre for Digital Entertainment, given that they are based out in industry with their placement partners; (WP3.3 Data management planning/WP6 Liaison, training & advocacy)
• A rough draft of our high-level data management policy has been produced and is now in the process of being refined; Cathy Pink will be attending the forthcoming workshop on policy development; (WP4 Policy development)
• We are getting closer to appointing the systems developer who will help us develop and pilot an interface between our VRE, iSusLab, and a pilot repository via SWORD2; in the meantime, we will be making progress by planning how we will pilot Electronic Lab Notebooks (ELNs); (WP5.2 Research workflow & data deposit)
• Work has begun on our data storage guidelines; (WP5.3 Data storage guidelines)
• After a very valuable meeting in January, at which we learned more about CERIF and Pure (the Current Research Information System currently being implemented at Bath), we’ve clarified Deliverable 5.4 — more on this to follow.