JISC

The final report of the project is available here:

The Supporting Data Management Infrastructure for the Humanities (Sudamih) Project forms part of a programme of activities at the University of Oxford to build an infrastructure capable of managing the research data produced at the University from inception to reuse. The Project developed training and software to assist researchers in the humanities better manage their data. It also considered the institutional support required to maintain these outputs and the costs and benefits of doing so.

The key outputs of Sudamih were a suite of training materials and courses to improve researchers‟ data management skills, and a pilot „Database as a Service‟ (DaaS) system enabling researchers to quickly and intuitively create, edit, search, and potentially open up relational databases of research data. Whilst the focus of the project was on the Humanities Division within Oxford, it is hoped that the outputs can in the future be extended to other disciplines, and the findings applied more generally across higher education institutions.

Sudamih was funded by the JISC under the Managing Research Data Programme, so project outputs have been made available to the UK Higher Education community for adaptation and reuse.

Notable findings from the Project include:

• The intellectual value of humanities datasets tends not to depreciate over time
• Humanities scholarship often aggregates to a „life‟s work‟ body of research, with any given researcher often wishing to go back to old notes, sources, or datasets in order to find new information
• Methods of organising data vary considerably, as does the extent to which researchers succeed in creating and maintaining a well-functioning system
• Most researchers are willing in principle to share their data with others, but in practice do not regularly do so, for a variety of reasons. In the humanities, issues surrounding the incompleteness of the original data, or the layer of interpretation often required to render it consistent, can lead to reluctance to share, as researchers worry that their „processed‟ data may be misinterpreted by others
• Data storage is generally on personally-owned machines and backing-up is generally also to personal devices on an ad hoc basis. Knowledge of centrally-provided services is limited and they are seldom used.
• There is a significant amount of confusion over the ownership of research data. This is exacerbated by complex situations in which multiple people or organisations may have different claims on the same resource.
• Data management training can have a large positive impact in terms of long-term cost savings relative to the near-term costs of running and maintaining courses and learning materials
• Researchers see various benefits of using a centrally-provided database management system such as the DaaS over current popular alternatives
• There is a need in the humanities for very-long-term data sustainability solutions and cost models designed to deal with effectively permanent storage and access

Key recommendations include:

• Base training around actual commonly-faced research problems, whilst also covering organisational principles and strategies
• Make it immediately obvious what aspects of data management any given training covers and who it is intended to benefit
• Be careful to use terms that the researchers understand rather than the technical terminology used by data librarians
•  Establish a single location or point of contact which researchers can be referred to when dealing with data management issues
• Institutions that are serious about winning research funding should in the future have a specialist technical advisory service which researchers can consult for assistance with the technical aspect of bids
• Universities should clearly disseminate information about central services that support data management to ensure researchers are aware of them
• Different academic departments and institutional service providers should work together to understand who should be responsible for implementing, and sustaining, various aspects of data management training
• Universities should clarify the intellectual property rights that researchers have with regard to their structured data outputs, and in particular their rights when depositing data in a repository or service such as the DaaS
• The HE sector should encourage and enable researchers to treat research data more like research publications, ensuring that they can be preserved, accessed, and cited over the long term