First day

Today is my first day in a new position. I am Research Data Management Senior Officer in the UK Data Archive working on a JISC supported project on research data management for ESRC data-rich investments. This involves working with ESRC Research Centres and programmes to assess their data management practices in social science research; implement and help develop effective data management planning and increase capacity through support and training. The project is due to run from now until the end of March, 2011.

My background is having worked the UK Data Archive for a couple of years. My former position was in the data processing section. Essentially, this was the link between depositors of data and secondary users where I was responsible for the validation, conversion, enrichment, and preparation for preservation and secondary use of social science data, accompanying documentation, and metadata. I worked almost exclusively with qualitative data, but essentially there was little difference between quantitative and qualitative processing, other than the length of time qualitative datasets took to read. In addition, I also presented ESDS workshops, assisted with the constructing of teaching material and writing promotional articles based on enhanced data.