“You made it, you take care of it”: Data Management as Personal Information Management

Abstract

This study explores how researchers at a major Midwestern university are managing their data, as well as the factors that have shaped their practices and those that motivate or inhibit changes to that practice. A combination of survey (n=363) and interview data (n=15) yielded both qualitative and quantitative results bearing on my central research question: In what types of data management activities do researchers at this institution engage? Corollary to that, I also explored the following questions: What do researchers feel could be improved about their data management practices? Which services might be of interest to them? How do they feel those services could most effectively be implemented?In this paper, I situate researchers’ data management practices within a theory of personal information management. I present a view of data management and preservation needs from researchers’ perspectives across a range of domains. Additionally, I discuss the implications that understanding research data management as personal information management has for introducing services to support and improve data management practice.

Open Social Scholarship Annotated Bibliography

“…Data management concerns effective methods for organizing data and documents through the application of a systematic mechanism. The works included here address metadata, database management, and data visualization (Fear 2011;Hedges, Hasan & Blanke 2007). Some articles investigate ethical uses of data obtained from research, as well as accountability mechanisms and guidelines to ensure that collected data is properly managed, stored, and preserved .…”

Modifying researchers’ data management practices

“…The literature exploring data management practices of academics has significantly increased in the last decade, with many universities surveying the data management practices of their academics and researchers (Henty et al, 2008;Fear, 2011;Peters and Dryden, 2011;Jahnke et al, 2012;Weller and Monroe-Gulick, 2014;Schumacher and VandeCreek, 2015;Kennan and Markauskaite, 2015). As the amount of research data being generated grows exponentially, universities are taking notice of how their researchers manage research data.…”

“…The data management practices of STEM researchers are heavily represented in the literature (Fear, 2011;Peters and Dryden, 2011). A number of studies have surveyed academics from across all disciplines within their institutions (Weller and Monroe-Gulick, 2014;Schumacher and VandeCreek, 2015), and social science and humanities researchers are often discussed within these broader studies.…”

Where Does All the Data Go: Quantifying the Final Disposition of Research Data

“…Established and well-funded data collections often have dedicated data management staff (Karasti, Baker, & Halkola, 2006) and large data centers to manage the petabyte datasets (Gray, Liu, Nieto-Santisteban, Szalay, DeWitt, & Heber, 2005;Hey & Trefethen, 2003). But in the main, it is individual scientists' responsibility to manage their data (Fear, 2011;Henty, Weaver, Bradbury, & Porter, 2008;Lynch, 2008;Lyon, 2007). Scientists expect to manage their data and understand the importance of good data management but often are unsure of how best to implement good data management practices (Henty et al, 2008;Pritchard, Anand, & Carver, 2005;Pryor & Donnelly, 2009).…”

“…Studies of the final disposition of research data are sparse. Much of the quantitative data used in the literature was collected as part of a project to develop systems, services, and policies for data preservation within a single organization or a consortium (Fear, 2011;Henty et al, 2008;Rolando, Doty, Hagenmaier, Valk, & Parham, 2013;Thompson, Robertson, & Greenberg, 2013).…”