Guest Column: Learn to Protect Your Research Data During 'Love Your Data Week'

Guest Column: Learn to Protect Your Research Data During 'Love Your Data Week'

By Jodi Reeves Flores and Christine KollenUA Libraries
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Jodi Reeves Flores
Jodi Reeves Flores
Christine Kollen
Christine Kollen

Do you love your research data? Do you need to love your data more? UA Libraries will be participating in Love Your Data week, Feb. 8-12, a nationwide event designed to raise awareness about research data management, sharing and preservation, along with the support and resources available at our University.

Maybe it hasn't happened to you, but we've all heard the horror stories: the graduate student deleting his or her data, the researcher losing months of work, hardware issues and proprietary software leading to a potentially catastrophic loss of data.

As any researcher who deals with physical samples knows, it can be just as easy for physical data to become scattered and disorganized. However, there are often established standards that are integrated into workflows that deal with physical data collection and storage. This isn't the case for digital data in many research fields. Poor organization and documentation of data can affect the efficiency of labs, publication of data and collaboration with other researchers.

Love Your Data week will focus on a different topic each day, with tips and tricks for managing research data, as well as stories, examples and resources. Tips will range from how to keep data safe using data snapshots as part of the research process to how to choose a data repository for when the data is ready to be released into the wide world. 

Members of the UA community can visit the UA Libraries' data management website each day of Love Your Data Week for more information on the day's topic. You can also follow the national conversation on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook via #LYD16. The Love Your Data blog will have additional tips, as well as activities researchers can use to better develop the management of their data.

There are multiple resources across campus that support research data management and curation at all points of the research life cycle.

For example, UA Libraries offers a wide range of research support, including consultations on research, access to research materials and databases, help developing data management plans for grants, information and consultations on copyright, the ability to digitize materials through the Express Document Center and tools for sharing and preserving your research, such as the Campus Repository.

Research Computing also offers multiple services – such as high performance computing, or HPC; statistical and visualization consulting; storage; visualization tools – and is a computer storage hub that makes high performance computing, as well as other computer system types, available to faculty, researchers and students.

Have a look at the UA Libraries' Data Management Resources page for more information on funding requirements, to access to an online tutorial on research data management and for news on upcoming workshops and events.

Have an issue managing your data on a project? Want someone to review your data management plan for a grant? Thinking about archiving your data? Schedule a consultation with the University's data curation librarian, Chris Kollen.

Jodi Reeves Flores is a postdoctoral research associate who works with UA Libraries' Office of Digital Innovation and Stewardship. Christine Kollen is the data curation librarian in the same office.

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