Shared RDM Service

Towards the end of last week I went to a meeting of colleagues from the N8 Universities to look at how we might collaborate on managing research data. This came out of the good collaborative work on our joint HPC facility which was established with EPSRC funding last year. We had IT Directors, Librarians and Research Data Management (RDM) Project workers from all institutions, and had a very productive half day. We were really looking for ideas that we could take forward to produce a shared N8 RDM service. So, we looked at areas where we could collaborative, areas where that might not be possible and barriers we might need to overcome. There was very positive support for some sort of shared RDM solution, possibly with a service catalogue of available options so that institutions could choose which ones they signed up to. The storage layer was an obvious area, and particularly archiving data, bearing mind that archiving is as much about deleting data as keeping it. CERN for example only keep about 10% of the data they generate. Training was another area which we thought was worth collaborating on, in much the same way we collaboratively produced Information Security Training materials. Which incidentally I completed yesterday and only got one thing wrong.