The management and preservation of research data moved centre stage at the recently held SCONUL conference in Edinburgh. The annual gathering of senior librarians heard from a number of speakers about the information needs of the research community and in particular the role of libraries in managing the increasing amounts of research data being created.
Among the speakers was JISC's Executive Secretary Dr. Malcolm Read, who began his presentation by saying that it was important - both to libraries and to the research community itself - that librarians be responsible for the management of institutional repositories. While subject-based repositories had not come to fruition, institutional repositories, he said, 'have the greater momentum' and needed to be aggregated to 'make sense of the bigger picture'.
He went on to say that there was a growing recognition that a journal article divorced from the data on which it was based was 'incomplete'; the quality of research is improved when linked to data', he said, which was why the question of research data and institutional repositories was such an important one and why it impacted on the quality and reputation of UK research.
Another key issue, he said, is that of interoperability in order to exploit the opportunities for inter-disciplinary research. The question of research data and institutional repositories is important and impacts on the quality and reputation of UK research.
Jean Sykes, Librarian at the London School of Economics, said research data was potentially a rich resource but that data was too often unstructured and inaccessible and its use hampered by a lack of policies and standards, formats and disciplines. She suggested that research data was not just about storage, but about 'the whole lifecycle - creation, selection, ingest storage retrieval, review, and so on.' There was a considerable demand for storage of research data, she claimed, and a 360 percent growth in anticipated data volumes over the next three years.
The UK Research Data Service, the result of a collaboration between Research Libraries UK, Russell Universities Group of IT Directors, JISC, SCONUL and more than 40 stakeholders, would attempt to help tackle this issue. The project was currently developing an understanding of the UK's current and future research needs, undertaking case studies and developing a detailed business plan for the continuation of the shared service.
Deborah Shorley, librarian at Imperial College London and head of the UK Research Reserve (UKRR), spoke about how the UKRR was looking to support the management, storage and preservation of low use printed journals. The results of a current bid to HEFCE of £9.8 million to roll out the initiative would be known shortly, she said.
