IG-ETRD meeting at RDA6 23 September 2015, Paris (15:30 - 17:00) - Call for participation and Agenda items

Dear fellow members of IG-ETRD,

as you may know, our IG is currently working towards an updated definition of skills and competencies for data handling. 

We're looking at data-handling skills needed for four staff groups: research librarians, research administrators, research infrastructure managers/operators and researchers.  Specifically, for each group we are not looking at the current standard job skill set but at the additional skills which are needed in order to work successfully with research data.

Laura Molloy set up a page on our wiki for this purpose: https://www.rd-alliance.org/groups/education-and-training-handling-research-data/wiki/education-and-skills-data-science-wiki

As you can see, we have input on research librarians, research infrastructure managers/operators and researchers. We welcome the addition of necessary skills on this page - please note your name in brackets at the end of your contribution.

Preparing for the next RDA plenary (our IG meeting is on Wednesday, September 23rd, at 15:30), it would be great to discuss the following questions on this mailing list:

• Are there any jobs missing that you think we should cover? 
• Which kind of taxonomy or competence framework is the most suitable for our efforts?

Let us have an active discussion on this list and conclude it in person in Paris. Thank you.

Best,

Christopher.

This may be of interest to the group: our experiences with research data management training for doctoral students in the social sciences.

In the last few years we've been finding ways to embed research data management training for doctoral students into doctoral training programmes. At the University of Essex, doctoral students can use their training credits (the Proficio scheme) to attend our training events, such as e.g. http://ukdataservice.ac.uk/news-and-events/eventsitem/?id=3879 

Last December we held a 2–day accredited doctoral training course at the University of Ghent (Belgium); this made us consider assessment methods, and we opted to have students develop a data management plan for their doctoral research for us to assess:  www.ugent.be/doctoralschools/en/doctoraltraining/courses/transferableskills/sbs/managing-and-sharing-your-research-data.htm.

Currently we have a FOSTER training programme with partners of the CESSDA network where we deliver 2-day workshops for PhD students at various European universities; http://ukdataservice.ac.uk/about-us/projects/foster-cessda-training/details

Typically the topics covered during the training are: writing a data management plan, licensing data and intellectual property, metadata and contextual description, ethical and legal aspects of sharing sensitive or confidential data, anonymizing research data for reuse, data archiving and long-term preservation, and data security and storage.

Teaching is delivered through a combination of presentations, practical exercises using existing datasets, discussions, and group work. 

Veerle Van den Eynden, UK Data Archive