Research Data Management: Storing & Organising Data

Thinking about how you store and organise data will help you avoid some of the following scenarios:

• All the information for your research project is stored on an encrypted memory stick. You drop the memory stick and it now malfunctions. You have no back-up copy.

See Storing Data 

• A researcher in another institution is challenging the results of some research you carried out a number of years ago.  The original data from the research would validate your findings.  However, you saved it on the hard drive of a computer you no longer have, so cannot provide the data.

See Storing Data 

•  You took a large number of photographs as part of a research project a couple of years ago.  You downloaded them from your camera and saved them in a 'photos' folder in a secure area.  Now, you need to find one of the images for a current project, and you have to trawl through all the items in the folder to find the right one.

See Organising Data 

• A colleague asks for data that a former member of staff produced.  You know where the data is and can find it easily.  You know there are no data protection or IP issues with this colleague accessing the data, so you send it to her.  She comes back to you straight away asking for a key as she does not know what the field names mean and cannot make sense of the data without that information.  You cannot contact the former staff member to ask.

See Organising Data

Policy on Managing Research Data at DMU

"De Montfort University is committed to research excellence and integrity and seeks to promote high standards of research data management throughout the research data lifecycle."