The electronic environment in which many researchers now live has opened up a Pandora's box of excitement and challenges in the data domain. The Editor of the book, Graham Pryor opens the title outlining why we might bother to manage research data and cites the “data deluge” as being one of the driving issues today: “while data may be the principal output from scholarly research, whatever the discipline, like the tip of an iceberg only a small proportion will be made visible” (p. 3) in the publications from research projects. Pryor sees this data has having worth and wealth and in need of sensible and proper custodianship. And he is not alone. Donnelly's chapter on the need for data management plans (Chapter 5) starts off by answering our questions on why we should bother to plan, followed by what is a template in a series of steps for decision making as one assesses a dataset. He calls upon examples to illustrate his points including one from the USA that became a decentralised approach to data management rather than a “nationally co‐ordinated resource” (p. 95), and he includes a case study of the UK Data Archive.
Various countries around the world have been working on this issue for some time and their varying models of operation are outlined in the chapters by Jones (Chapter 3) who describes the UK experience, before briefly outlining practices in the other countries of Australia, Canada, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand and the USA. Collins describes the UK data centre situation in much more detail in Chapter 8, Whyte adds further information on the UK and European experiences in Chapter 10 and the Australian and the US practices are further discussed in Chapter 9 by Treloar, Choudhury and Michener.
The appearance of this title is timely, since it is becoming evident that librarians are playing an increasingly integral role in research data management, both in the paper and electronic environments. And so they should be. My involvement in the information industry before I became an academic was in geoscience information (mining and petroleum industries in particular) and what did I spend a lot of time doing at my workplace? Data management, and not all of the data was of a research orientation. So I am not sure that I see the librarian as “re‐purposed” (p. 16) as others might. Data management continues to be alive and well and often managed by librarian colleagues who currently work in these industries. Some library schools in Australia, including the one I am associated with, recognised this string to the librarian's bow a long time ago and integrated records management and archival practices into teaching programmes. Corrall's Chapter 6 expands on why librarians should be involved in data management, and suggests some ways in which library school programmes and professional development might engage with data management.
The reasons for the increased and current interest in research data management are explained in Chapter 7 by Procter, Halfpenny and Voss who outline e‐research initiatives by international governments and the role of higher education institutes in this. They cover some of the ironies of e‐data storage: the privately held USB stick, CD or DVD, and the need to break down the personal researcher barriers to ownership of the data once research results are published. These authors' wisdom on data sustainability fits neatly with Lavoie's approach in Chapter 4 which follows a theme of sustainability of research data from a policy and philosophical point of view. It seems to me that this is captured neatly in his comment regarding decision making on what data to keep: “(t)he long‐term utility of a particular dataset may not become apparent for some years after creation, and its potential use may come from unexpected quarters” (p. 73). Might this be a useful mantra for data curators and policy setters? He later comments that “the greater the cost and effort required to reproduce the dataset, the stronger the case for preserving it” (p. 74).
But as the chapters in this title describe, data management is not only about the philosophies and practices of librarianship, although the ”active process by which digital resources remain discoverable, accessible” (p. vii) is music to this librarian's ears. The quote continues “and intelligible” (p. vii) and here we see the integration of other professional expertise in the mix, alongside that of the professions of the data creators, who can come from all disciplines in life. In Chapter 2, Higgins describes in useful detail the Data Curation Lifecycle Model of the Data Curation Centre and concludes by reminding us that the final action of this model is “to curate and preserve […] [so that the] data remain accessible for the long term” (p. 42).
Perhaps to the uninitiated, the varying practices and approaches to data management around the world as described in this title, might seem a confused can of worms. But common themes emerge from the chapters: data in whatever format is important; research data is important; all of this data can be re‐used and even the most seasoned researcher may never know by whom; in order for this to happen, sound research data management practices for both hard copy and e‐data are vital.
This title is a very useful compendium of the issues and practices in data management today and I would recommend it as an essential reference for anyone who has an interest in, teaches in and practices research data management.
