Developing sustainable research data management services: an institutional collaboration

Abstract

UNSW Australia is developing a research data management (RDM) service. We present the Library’s contributions to an infrastructure to support the service, including a curation-focussed information repository based on Fedora Commons software. Partnerships that have formed between the Division of Research, UNSW IT and the UNSW library, in both governance and support capacities, are fundamental for ensuring that the RDM infrastructure is fit for purpose and is sustainable as a long-term service for the UNSW research community.

The service was constructed with reference to use cases of researchers and administrative units, across the lifecycle of a research project: project initiation, grant application and management, data generation, date storage, and data publishing and sharing. The infrastructure underpinning the UNSW RDM service is divided into five layers: collection, management, storage, access and support. It is designed to minimise duplication of effort for researchers, whose metadata for data management plans pre-populates the form for deposit of dataset records, and is further re-used in reports for various purposes.

The infrastructure provides a foundation for establishing future relationships between new and existing stakeholders, thereby developing a sustainable information ecosystem for managing and disseminating UNSW research data.