Abstracts
To Dare or Not to Dare: Collaboration in eResearch at Monash University
Monday 4 May 2009, 1330 - 1400
Presenters: Wilna Macmillan and Neil Clarke
Monash University, VIC
Presenter Biography
Wilna Macmillan is Director Client Services Science Health and Engineering at Monash University Library. She has responsibility for five branch libraries Research Support, Document Delivery and Lending Services, leads the Library’s Medicine Nursing and Health Sciences Faculty Team and jointly manages Client Services overall. She produced the library’s Research Support Plan in 2006 to focus and articulate the library’s role in research. She has also been involved in establishing Learning Skills within in the Library over the past 18 months. Prior to joining Monash University in 2005, she held various positions at CSIRO, in both Librarianship and Communication working closely with researchers from ‘concept to commercialisation’ of research projects for more than 20 years. Wilna has worked in a range of tertiary and special libraries in Australia, the USA and the UK before joining CSIRO.
Neil Clarke is the Director, Research Support Services, Information Technology Services at Monash University. prior to this he has been working in the Monash eresearch centre developing and contributing to eresearch initiatives.
Abstract
NCRIS (the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy) and the National e-Research Coordinating Committee have identified data management as one of the most pressing needs facing the development of research, especially e-Research, in Australia.
Research Data Management is the storage and curation of data generated by research. Research data is valuable for a number of reasons. Most importantly, it has value to researchers for the duration of their research and after the completion of the research. It may also have residual value to those researchers after results have been published, as well as having value for other researchers or the wider community. Because of this, and given the investment Monash University and the Australian research community have made in the research, this data needs to be carefully managed and accessible for use and reuse, in ways that satisfy legal, statutory and funding bodies’ requirements for the present and future research needs.
Monash is playing a leading role in research data management. This is evidenced by its leadership role through ARROW, DART and ARCHER, as well as the Monash University Information Management Strategy. Monash will also be the lead agent in the Australian National Data Service (ANDS). This is a national project which will be working to develop good data management practice, collaboration, infrastructure and services.
This paper will provide background on the strategic environment for data management. It will then provide an overview of the implementation of the data management initiatives at Monash University which is a collaborative endeavour between the Library, eResearch Centre, Research Office, Information Technology Services and Records and Archives under the Monash University Information Management Strategy.
The Data Management Policy, Data Management Procedure and Guidelines will be outlined and various strategies revealed towards the implementation of these.
This will include the DARE Project. DARE is not an acronym, it encompasses the keywords most closely associated with this project - data management, ARROW, archives, research, repositories, enablement, ePress. It is an initiative to increase outreach into the faculties by extending the role of contact librarians to include data management, building on their specialist knowledge of the information environments of their disciplines and existing relationships with researchers. A ‘triage’ model is being developed to enable researchers to manage research data using range of expertise and infrastructure for current and future needs as we move further into the digital age and data management.
A critical component of the Monash e-research strategy is LaRDS, the Large Research Data Storage.
The Monash Large Research Data Store (LaRDS) is Monash’s central petascale research data store. LaRDS provides hundreds of terabytes (TB) of capacity for storage of Monash research data.
LaRDS can be used to store all types of research data: from raw experimental data; data downloaded directly from scientific instruments; backup of research data held on your c: drive; databases; simulations; collaborative works; cultural archives; audio, video and multimedia digital content; long-term preservation of archival material; through to published research results via the ARROW repository
Conclusions will be made about the future of data management and the learnings from the journey outlined above.
