Research Data Management

Managing Active or Working Data

Active or Working data is that is in a state of analysis, evolution or monitoring.

Managing 'active data' involves

1. Appropriate storage of data
2. Appropriate curation of data

Active data storage

As has been discussed in Plan & Design, research data should be stored on institutionally provided storage solutions such as OneDrive and SharePoint. The university's provided storage provides

• Up to 90 days retrieval of deleted data
• Security
• Remote accessibility
• File versioning

Research data should NOT be exclusively kept on computer HDD, portable HDD, USB sticks, or commercial cloud services due to

• risk of data loss due to loss, corruption or damage of physical hardware
• risk of data loss due to hacking, malware, phishing or ransomware
• commerical cloud service privacy policies
• commercial cloud service geographical location - which may violate data sovereignty contract requirements

If research is conducted in the field with no internet access, reseachers should ensure their device is synchronised with  data is uploaded to

Active data curation

As has been discussed in detail in 'Collect & Create', it is important to organise, document and describe the data and files that are created. This includes

• Files and folders that are descriptive of the contents
• Applying a discipline specific or general metadata standard to ensure consistent metadata descriptions using Open file formats
• Using a discipline specific controlled vocabulary where possible to ensure research is findable by other pracitioners in the field if the data or metadata will be Open.

Active data should also be saved using standard non-proprietary file formats.

Original raw data should be kept separate from processed or analysed data and never overwritten.

Further Reading

Data Analysis   Data Quality