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Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2007 11:55:01 -0400
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From: Clifford Lynch <cliff@cni.org>
Subject: JISC Report: "Dealing with Data: Roles, Rights, Responsibilities,
 Relationships"
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Dr. Liz Lyon, who is well known to many in the CNI community for her 
work on the EBank project and her roles at UKOLN and the UK Digital 
Curation Center, has just done a new report for the JISC dealing with 
data curation roles and responsibilities that should be extremely 
timely not just for the UK but for those elsewhere struggling with 
similar questions. Below, I reproduce Neil Jacobs' announcement of 
her report and the report's URL.

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI
------------------------


The data deluge is upon us, and now is the right time to be taking 
action to ensure that we are not overwhelmed. A new report "Dealing 
with Data" charts a practical path forward and will help all 
stakeholders plan the next steps in data curation. The report, by Dr 
Liz Lyon, Director, UKOLN and Associate Director, DCC, is 
strategically positioned to provide a bridge between the Research 
Information Network's high-level Framework of Principles and 
Guidelines for the stewardship of research data, and 
practitioner-focussed technical development work.

Why is data such a big challenge? Whereas articles or books have, 
until recently, been fairly standard formats across disciplines, data 
has always been diverse, with some disciplines using rich textual 
sources, others using massive petabyte datasets, and still others 
using data that changes by the second. The range of stakeholders 
involved is wide, too, with important roles for funders, 
institutions, JISC and others if the aim - well managed and usable 
data - is to be achieved.

The report reviews the variety of data, and arrangements for its 
curation and use, across disciplines.The work of funders, national 
data centres, institutional repositories, learned societies and the 
Digital Curation Centre are all documented, with a view to 
identifying (as the report's subtitle says) the "roles, rights, 
responsibilities and relationships", that are emerging as important.

The report's recommendations offer a practical way forward in this 
area, where the sheer scale of the task can be daunting. JISC and 
others are already taking forward work in a number of the areas 
highlighted, such as the costs and benefits of data preservation, and 
offering discipline-specific guidance to the sector. Further work is 
planned, including the development of a 'Data Audit Framework' to 
enable all universities and colleges to carry out an audit of 
departmental data collections, awareness, policies and practice for 
data curation and preservation.

We are moving rapidly into an era of data-driven research and 
scholarship, across the broad range of academic disciplines. If the 
currency of that work, the data itself, is not to be debased, then it 
needs to be well managed, so that researchers can use it both now and 
into the future.

The final report is available at:
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/programme_digital_repositories/project_dealing_with_data.aspx

Best wishes
Neil

-- 
Neil Jacobs <n.jacobs@jisc.ac.uk>
JISC Executive, Beacon House, Queens Road, Bristol, BS8 1QU
+44 (0)117 33 10772   /   07768 040179