JISC

Publication Date: 12 June 2008

The management and preservation of research data moved centre stage at the SCONUL conference in Edinburgh today. 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 were 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.

But there are, he suggested, a number of questions to be dealt with: ‘Who owns the data; how do you select what is worth proving; which resources should be open access, how much will it cost, and so on’. But he said that the ‘managerial issues are such that the library profession is well placed to deal with them.

Another key issue is that of interoperability, he said, in order to exploit the opportunities for inter-disciplinary research. So repositories needed to be built according to standards, and JISC is, he said, investing in such activities and, for example, talking to partners such as the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) about the possibility of supporting the development of cultural repositories. 'The question of research data and institutional repositories is important and impacts on the quality and reputation of UK research.'

Repositories UK is, he said, in the forefront of setting the agenda for technical interoperability (shared standards) and the policy frameworks (shared practice) for the evolving federated network of digital repositories in the UK, the ultimate aim of which was the creation of ‘a layer of scholarly content’ made up of both open access and negotiated content.

Jean Sykes, Librarian at the London School of Economics followed and began by saying that research data is potentially a rich resource but that data are too often unstructured and inaccessible and their use hampered by a lack of policies and standards, formats and disciplines. Echoing Malcolm Read’s point she said that ‘leverage of as much research data as possible would lift the volume and reputation of UK of research.’

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% growth in anticipated data volumes over the next three years. 

The UK Research Data Service, the result of a collaboration between Research Libraries UK (RLUK), RUGIT (Russell Universities Group of IT Directors) JISC, SCONUL and more than 40 stakeholders, would attempt to help tackle this issue, she said. 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.

Jean Sykes called on delegates to be advocates for the new shared service. It would not, she said, threaten established systems, including existing data centres, but rather, it would ‘leverage additional volumes of research information in order to enhance and improve the reputation of UK research.’

Deborah Shorley, librarian at Imperial College London and head of the UK Research Reserve (UKRR), spoke about the UKRR, which is looking to support the management, storage and preservation of low use printed journals. The results of a current bid to HEFCE of £9.8m to roll out the initiative would be known shortly, she said, one which, if successful, would represent a ‘culture change for the higher education sector.’ The initiative is, she said, ‘part of something bigger, a key part of the UK’s research infrastructure.’

The SCONUL annual conference continues tomorrow.

Further information on the SCONUL conference