CDS Podcast - A Data Horror Story
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Data horror stories – when data management goes wrong - are actually more common than you might realize. What’s useful about sharing – and celebrating - a data horror story is to learn from the story and to improve our data management processes and decisions in the future.
This anonymous story was captured by the Leiden University Library staff, to help promote good data management during the national data horror week at the end of October 2019. The details about the researcher, the domain, and the university are irrelevant – what’s important is how this real story can help us learn a few lessons and avoid similar problems.
In summary, the story reminds us to learn more about good data management through the university’s data management support services, identify which challenges will be relevant and write down how they might be solved in a data management plan, identify at least one person in the research group with responsibility for the overall data management, and think about how decisions and choices can be made to ensure the research data is accessible and reusable for at least ten years after the project is finished.
If you want to tell us about your own data horror story, contact the Centre for Digital Scholarship data management support team at datamanagement@library.leidenuniv.nl