Data preservation (free course)
This course provides an introduction to implementable practice for ensuring continued access to and preservation of your digital research data over time.
Starting a research project can be overwhelming, so it's important to manage your data to ensure you don’t lose it. Here we provide an overview for individuals and collaborative projects. This course is made up of four modules that take you through the various aspects of data preservation.
Course Details
We all put a lot of work into creating our research data whatever form that might be; whether its notes on secondary and primary sources, a database, image collection, or spreadsheet. How much thought do you put into its longer term or even short term preservation? Do you back up your data? How? Have you considered whether it should be made legible for other historians to use at later dates or to be ready-made for inclusion in article submissions? This short course introduces you to the idea behind data preservation and gives you straight forward, every day advice on how to work better and save time by putting data preservation first and foremost in your mind. The course is broken down into four main sections:
- Introduction to data preservation
- Why preservation?
- Preservation practices
- Access Sharing
Each section includes advice, exercises and information that is essential reading for anyone beginning a research project.
This course was developed by ULCC (University of London Computer Centre) on behalf of JISC and in collaboration with the IHR. It is one of the primary outcomes of the SHARD project (see the project blog for more information: http://shard-jisc.blogspot.co.uk/.