Oct 21, 2014

Welcome to the data stories blog

data stories is a community site for anyone interested in stories about good and bad practices in research and scholarly data management, sharing, and re-use.  The aim of the site is to collect and present stories submitted by the community.

The idea came about in September 2014 from a discussion on the Research Data Management mailing list hosted on JISCmail and from the discussions at the Research Data Alliance (RDA) Fourth Plenary in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The RDA Engagement Interest Group and the Digital Curation Centre are taking a lead in co-ordinating the effort.  We are trialling this blog as a medium to collect and present the stories and would welcome your input.

You will be invited to contribute your examples to the site.  Through these stories, we hope to share information about efforts to change the cultures around data. We hope to build a portfolio of examples from different disciplines and covering various facets of research data management.

We welcome examples big or small, from simple effective images for others to use in their training, to case study write ups that describe your successes or wars.  The topics covered can include any aspect of research and scholarly data management: stories of data loss, the impact of data sharing or experiences of changing policy and practice.

How to contribute

Further guidelines on how to make contributions will be added shortly.  If you have ideas on ways to collect contributions, please add them in a comment.  Ideas so far include using a collection form, inviting guest blog posts, conducting interviews, and running story sessions at workshops.

How to use this site

Different methods of exploring the content of this site will be provided through the blog features.  Your suggestions are very welcome - please do comment.  What categories would be useful and what other methods of exploring the content will be needed? How would you like to use the site?  What would you like to be able to find in the site, and how would you go about it?

How the site is managed

The data stories blog is brought to you by  the RDA Engagement Interest Group and the Digital Curation Centre.  We will be gathering feedback from the wider community while we explore how to build a story site most effectively.  You can start us off by adding your comments to this blog post.

2 comments:

  1. Hi,
    This is a great start to a good idea.
    May I suggest that you add the CC licence at the bottom of each post that is covered by that? I couldn't find any indication on a particular post, or "how to use this site" but I did find in the Site Policy that "Unless stated otherwise, stories are published under the CC-BY 2.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/) if the person writing the story has those rights."
    This could be made clear on the page of each story (please).

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  2. Thanks Robin for picking up on this important topic. We need to distinguish between entries that are just a pointer to an external source (and then find out and indicate if the external item has rights or permissions attached and what they are) and stories that are written up for the blog for which the submitter has the rights and is able to grant permissions. For the purpose of re-use it is really important to be able to tell if the item can be re-used or not, and under what conditions. I'm thinking if the blog entry is just a summary and a pointer, making the rights attached to the external item clear is what is required?

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