Progress report

This blog was intended as an experiement. The problem I've found in maintaining it was that it was difficult to be informative about the progress of the project and the challenges and problems we were encountering, and maintain a level of confidentiality as to who and where we were encountering these challenges and problems. Twitter takes care of the informative aspect, while this blog was seeming more like a commentary on the standard of spreads and hospitality provided by centres and programmes (which by the way has been excellent).

 

However, we are around mid-point. Last week our progress report was approved and arising from it we reported three main themes emerging from project in terms of outputs and training.

• Data ownership. A lack of awareness about who owns primary data, and a lack of consideration about the implications of using secondary data in terms of licences and copyright.
• A need to devise strategies and tools for working across institutions.
• Difficulty in getting good data from centres and programmes on data management costs.

For a richer explination of these themes we have produced a report on current data management practices in the social sciences

 

Our next challenge is to devise centre specific strategies to address these themes, but stratagies that can also have a generic application for social science data investments.