Research data - what does it *really* look like?

Interesting post from Jenny Mitcham at the University of York on the types of files that they are being asked to curate.

https://digital-archiving.blogspot.com.au/2016/05/research-data-what-does-it-really-look.html


Work continues on our Filling the Digital Preservation Gap project and I thought it was about time we updated you on some of the things we have been doing.

While my colleague Julie has been focusing on the more technical issues of implementing Archivematica for research data. I have been looking at some real research data and exploring in more detail some of the issues we discussed in ourphase 1 report.

For the past year, we have been accepting research data for longer term curation. Though the systems for preservation and access to this data are still in development, we are for the time being able to allocate a DOI for each dataset, manage access and store it safely (ensuring it isn't altered) and intend to ingest it into our data curation systems once they are ready.

Having this data in one place on our filestore does give me the opportunity to test the hypothesis in our first report about the wide range of file formats that will be present in a research dataset and also the assertion that many of these will not be identified by the tools and registries in use for the creation of technical metadata.

So, I have done a fairly quick piece of analysis on the research data, running a tool called Droid developed by The National Archives over the data to get an indication of whether the files can be recognised and identified in an automated fashion.
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Nature article: The struggle with image glut

The struggle with image glut

Experiments that generate millions of images have forced scientists to find new ways to store and share terabytes of experimental data.

• Jeffrey M. Perkel

28 April 2016