This section addresses the implementation of the data management objectives defined in the data management plan or, more generally, those defined prior to data collection. In particular, it addresses the documentation of research data for its better discoverability and reusability, the preparation of research data for long-term archiving, and the versioning process.
- Documentation of Research DataPlanning the documentation of research data generally means to decide about the metadata, i.e. data which help to give meaning to a data object, that need to be documented with regards to a given data collection process. Information about which metadata should be created can be received from different sources. On the one hand the majority of data archives have their own set of mandatory metadata that have to be provided by the data depositor. In most cases this will be administrative metadata, i.e. information on managing a resource, such as when and how it was created, file type and… Read more: Documentation of Research Data
- File Formats & VersioningChoosing the right file formats for long-term preservation If researchers want to preserve research data on the long term, they should seek to improve the technical availability of their data by converting data to endurable formats which are supposed to be accessible 5, 10 or 20 years from now. For simple data matrices, text files fulfil this requirement (if they are accompanied by a codebook that makes the data interpretable). Since such formats are not available for all kinds of data, some repositories ensure that data are migrated to new formats if theold format is outdated. Besides these rather general… Read more: File Formats & Versioning