No. 1 (2020): Workshop on FAIR Research Data Curation

On January 20-21, 2020, RDA in Norway together with UiT The Arctic University of Norway, organized a workshop in FAIR research data curation.

The aim of the workshop was to provide practical training in four central areas of research data management and curation: documentation and metadata, file organization and file format, copyright and ownership, and licensing (see the workshop announcement).

The course was aimed at staff working with research support at Norwegian research organizations. Emphasis was placed on data that can be openly shared, and on data from researchers belonging to the so-called long tail, that is smaller and medium-sized data sets. The course therefore did not emphasize big data from research projects that have access to extensive research infrastructure.

Five trainers introduced each their thematic session: 

  • Iris Alfredsson (Swedish National Data Service) on documentation and metadata 
  • Philipp Conzett (UiT The Arctic University of Norway) on file organization and file format, and on metadata in linguistics 
  • Erik Hjerde (UiT The Arctic University of Norway) on metadata in life sciences
  • Olav Torvund (University of Oslo) on copyright and ownership
  • Aysa Ekanger (UiT The Arctic University of Norway) on licensing 

Each thematic session was followed by hands-on exercises where the participants had to apply their acquired knowledge on near-authentic datasets provided in the testbase of DataverseNO.

The workshop gathered 46 participants from 16 Norwegian research organizations, and there were even more on the waiting list. This shows that there is a great demand for expertise in data curation in Norway, too. 

Course announcement

Organizers: 

Philipp Conzett, UiT The Arctic University of Norway 

Leif Longva, UiT The Arctic University of Norway 

Published: 2020-03-12