Other Research Support Guides 2. Find & Manage Research Literature >> 3. Doing the Research >> 4. Writing up your Research >> 5. Publish & Share >> 6. Measure Impact
As well as Subject Librarians and the Research Data Co-ordinator who can give you specific help on data issues, the Library run data handling workshops - three hour sessions covering best practices for managing your data.
We can also arrange courses for your research group, including all those available through the Data Carpentry program - including SQL, Open Refine, and Data visualization in R and Python
Welcome to the Research Data Management Guide
No data, no paper.
Having your data available is becoming the norm for more and more disciplines. We all need to get skills in publishing and presenting our datasets. The library can help right from the beginning of your project, with courses in handling your data, right through to the end, in helping you make it available.
There are a lot of places to store your data to back up your research. We have combed the available alternatives, and can recommend some services that will meet your needs.
You'll need somewhere that can give your data a good identifier (DOI) and will preserve it forever. You'll want to put in lots of good metadata so people can find it when they search. You'll also need to license it so others know how they can cite and reuse it. We recommend Figshare. It is free, easy to use, very popular, and you can create projects shared with your colleagues. Other excellent services are the Open Science Framework, Zenodo and Dryad.
Dropbox is a straightforward tool that can share your data with specific people, and help you make it available to journal editors and those requesting your data in one click. The other data repositories mentioned above can also share with specific collaborators. You can apply for an institutional account with no size limits through ITS
Canterbury offer a free service for researchers with large or confidential datasets that need to be kept secure on campus. Big datasets are hard to move around, and are best if they are local. The Canterbury Research Data Storage Service can be accessed in a number of ways by Windows, Macintosh and Unix based computers.
Your local Subject Librarian can help, and the Library have a team of research metadata experts who can help you through the process of choosing a data repository, and fill in all the appropriate metadata for it. Having the right subjects and identifiers can make the difference between your hard work disappearing without trace, and being found.
What can I do?