Presentation Summary
At last year’s THETA, we presented on the Macro View, a Research Data Culture Conversation (RDCC) initiative which surveyed Australian research organisations on their data holdings which showed an estimated 23% growth in Australia’s research data holdings between 2021 and 2022. As well as a first ever estimate of data volumes, the surveyed highlighted a gap in organisations’ ability to effectively characterise their research data or gain insights that would inform operational imperatives. As a result, through the ARDC Institutional Underpinnings programme, UNSW led two projects – Business Intelligence and Reporting, and Retention and Disposal. The yearlong projects engaged research organisations from across Australia to discuss their experience of characterising their research data and the alignment between research project lifecycle activities and key decisions. The projects identified areas within the existing research project lifecycle where investments would accelerate insights and improve an organisation’s ability to make decisions pertinent to governance, sustainability and infrastructure investments. This has informed the research data benchmarking survey, an activity initiated in 2024 in partnership with CAUDIT, to support the ongoing assessment of institution's ability to assess their data holdings.
This presentation will report on the findings from the two projects as well as early findings from the CAUDIT benchmarking survey.
Meet the Speakers
Luc Betbeder-Matibet
Director, Research Technology Services, University of New South Wales
Luc Betbeder-Matibet is a nationally recognised subject matter expert in High-Performance Research Computing, Research Data practices and shared Research Infrastructure services. He is Vice-President of AeRo (Australia's eResearch Organisation) and co-chair of the eResearch Australasian peak Annual Conference. He is an Adjunct Senior Lecturer in UNSW Faculty of Medicine Centre for Big Data and has been a Visiting Scientist with the Data61 Visual Analytics Team in Australia's National Science Agency CSIRO. He has held director-level roles for 15 years in higher-ed ICT and eResearch. Luc is currently the Executive Director Research Technology Services at UNSW, a shared services function that he established. Recently, Luc has been working with colleagues to regularly count how many HPC cores and Research Data there are in Australia and New Zealand.
Ai-Lin Soo
Project Manager, University of New South Wales
Ai-Lin Soo is a nationally recognised subject matter expert in research data practices who has used her experiences to contribute to institutional and national projects to improve data management practices. Some of her projects include activities under the Research Data Culture Conversation such as "The Macro View of Australian and New Zealand Aotearoa Research Data". In her pursuit to improve research data management practices, she is currently undertaking a Masters of Philosophy. As well as this, Ai-Lin is experienced in supporting research endeavours and is the Operations Manager for the Ai for Law Enforcement and Community Safety (AiLECS) Lab, a research centre partnership with law enforcement.
