The following will come across as a rant. Which it is. But it’s a well intentioned rant. Please bear in mind that I care about good practice in data sharing, documentation, and preservation. I know there are many people working to support it, generally under-funded, often having to justify their existence to higher-ups who care more about the next Glam Mag article than whether there’s any evidence to support the findings. But, and its an important but, those political fights won’t become easier until researchers know those people exist, value their opinions and input, and internalise the training and practice they provide. The best way for that to happen is to provide the discovery points, tools and support where researchers will find them, in a way that convinces us that you understand our needs. This rant is an attempt to illustrate how large that gap is at the moment.

As a researcher I…have a problem

I have a bunch of data. It’s a bit of a mess, but its not totally disorganised and I know what it is. I want to package it up neatly and put it in an appropriate data repository because I’m part of the 2% of researchers that actually care enough to do it. I’ve heard of Zenodo. I know that metadata is a thing. I’d like to do it “properly”. I am just about the best case scenario. I know enough to know I need to know more, but not so much I think I know everything.

More concretely I specifically have data from a set of interviews. I have audio and I have notes/transcripts. I have the interview prompt. I have decided this set of around 40 files is a good package to combine into one dataset on Zenodo. So my next step is to search for some guidance on how to organise and document that data. Interviews, notes, must be a common form of data package right? So a quick search for a tutorial, or guidance or best practice?

Nope. Give it a go. You either get a deep dive into metadata schema (and remember I’m one of the 2% who even know what those words mean) or you get very high level generic advice about data management in general. Maybe you get a few pages giving (inconsistent) advice on what audio file formats to use. What you don’t get is set of instructions that says “this is the best way to organise these” or good examples of how other people have done it. The latter would be ideal, just finding an example which is regarded as good, and copying the approach. I’m really trying to get advice on a truly basic question: should I organise by interview (audio files and notes together) or by file type (with interviews split up).

As a researcher trying to do a good job of data deposition, I want an example of my kind of data being done well, so I can copy it and get on with my research

As a researcher…I’m late and I’m in a hurry. I don’t have the time to find you.

Now a logical response to my whining is “get thee to your research data support office and get professional help”. Which isn’t bad advice. Again, I’m one of the 5-10% who know that my institution actually has data support. The fact that I’m in the wrong timezone is perhaps a bit unusual, but the fact that I’m in a hurry is not. I should have done this last week, or a month ago, or before the funder started auditing data sharing. In the UK with the whole country in a panic this is particularly bad at the moment with data and scholarly communications support folks oscillating wildly between trying to get any attention from researchers and being swamped when we all simultaneously panic because reports are due.

Most researchers are going to reach for the web and search. And the resources I could find are woeful as a whole. Many of them are incomprehensible, even to me. But worse, virtually none of them are actually directed at my specific use case. I need step by step instructions, with examples to copy. I’m sure there are good sources out there, but they’re not easy to find. Many of the highest ranked hits are out of date, and populated with dead links (more on that particular problem later). But the organisations providing that information are actually highly ranked by search engines. If those national archives, data support organisations worked together more, kept pages more updated and frankly did a bit of old-fashioned Google Bombing and SEO it would help a lot. Again, remember I kind of know what I’m looking for. User testing on search terms could go a long way.

As a researcher looking for best practice guidance online, I need clear, understandable, and up to date guidance to be at the top of my search results, so I can avoid the frustration that will lead me to just give up.

As a researcher…if I figure out what I should do I want useable tools to help me.

Lets imagine that I find the right advice and get on and figure out what I’m going to do. Lets imagine that I’m going to create a structure with a top level human-readable readme.txt, machine readable DDI metadata, the interview prompt (rtf and txt) and then two directories, one for audio (FLAC, wav), one for notes (rtf) with consistent filenames. I’m going to zip all that up and post it to Zenodo. I’m going to use the Community function at Zenodo to collect up all the packages I create for this project (because that provides an OAI-PMH end point for the project). Easy! Job done.

Right. DDI metadata. There will be a tool for creating this obviously. Go to website…look for a “for researchers” link. Nope. Ok. Tools. That’s what I need. Ummm…ok…any of these called “writer”? No. “Editor”…ok a couple. That link is broken, those tools are windows only. This one I have to pay for and is Windows only. This one has no installation instructions and seems to be hosted on Google Code.

Compared to some other efforts DDI is actually pretty good. The website looks as though it has been updated recently. If you dig down into “getting started” there is at least some outline advice that is appropriate for researchers, but that actually gets more confusing as you get deeper in. Should I just be using Dublin Core? Can’t you just send me to a simple set of instructions for a minimal metadata set? If the aim is for a standard, any standard to get into the hands of the average jobbing researcher, it has to be either associated with tools I can use, or give examples where I can cut and paste to adapt for my own needs.

I’m fully aware that the last thing there sends a chill down the spine of both curators and metadata folks but the reality is either your standard is widely used or it is narrowly implemented for those cases where you have fully signed up professional curators or you have a high quality tool. Both of these will only ever be niche. The majority of researchers will never fit the carefully built tools and pipelines. Most of us generate bitty datasets that don’t quite fit in the large scale specialised repositories. We will always have to adapt patterns and templates and that’s always going to be a bit messy. But I definitely fall on the side of at least doing something reasonably well rather than do nothing because its not perfect.

As a researcher who knows what metadata or documentation standard to use, I need good usable (and discoverable) tools or templates to generate it, so that I a) actually do it and b) get it as right as possible.

As a researcher…I’m a bit confused at this point.

The message we get is that “this data stuff matters”. But when we go looking what we mostly find is badly documented and not well preserved. Proliferating websites with out of date broken links and reference to obsolete tools. It looks bad when the message is that high quality documentation and good preservation matter, but those of us shouting that message don’t seem to follow it ourselves. This isn’t the first time I’ve said this, it wouldn’t hurt for RDM folks to do a better job of managing our own resources to the standards we seek to impose on researchers.

I get exactly why this is, none of this is properly funded or institutionally supported. It’s infrastructure. And worse than that its human and social infrastructure rather than sexy new servers and big iron for computation. As Nature noted in an editorial this week there is a hypocrisy at the heart of funder/government-led data agenda in failing to provide the kinds of support needed for this kind of underpinning infrastructure. It’s no longer the money itself so much as the right forms of funding to support things that are important, but not exciting. I’m less worried about new infrastructures than actually properly preserving and integrating the standards and services we have.

But more than that there’s a big gap. I’ve framed my headings in the form of user stories. Most of the data sharing infrastructure, tools and standards is still failing to meet researchers where we actually are. I have some folder of data. I want to do a good job. What should I do, right now because the funder is on my back about it!?!

Two resources would have solved my problem:

1. First an easily discoverable example of best practice for this kind of data collection. Something that came to the top of the search results when I search for “best practice for archiving depositing records of interviews”. An associated set of instructions and options would have been useful but not critical.
2. Having identified what form of machine readable metadata was best practice a simple web-based platform independent tool to generate that metadata, either through a Q&A form based approach or some form of wizard. Failing that at least a good example I could modify.

As a researcher that’s what I really needed and I really failed to find it. I’m sympathetic, moderately knowledgeable, and I can get the worlds best RDM advice by pinging off a tweet. And I still struggled. It’s little wonder that we’re losing most of the mainstream.

As a researcher concerned to develop better RDM practice, I need support to meet me where I am, so ultimately I can support you in making the case that it matters.