Exchange of Experience on Research Data Management and Archives, Monday 16th November, 11am to 3pm, refreshments and sandwich lunch included, at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.

Dear All

As part of our Explore your Archives events, we are holding an Exchange of Experience on Research Data Management (RDM) and Archives. Here at the School, RDM is within the Archives Service but I think that this is a fairly unique location for this service within academic institutions. 

The focus of the event will be to explore the relationship between RDM professionals and Archivists as I believe that there is a lack of communication between the two. There have been a number of occasions where this issue has come up including a recent workshop held at the School to celebrate the end of our RDM project (it is now a permanent service). One of the RDM speakers showed an image of old video tapes containing data and started to speak about not knowing how to deal with this type of accession. I asked how the archives were involved in this and it seems like there was no relationship at all which I found worrying. There was further discussion on how RDM is a career opportunity for subject librarians and there are fairly regular emails on the RDM listserve which discuss how to deal with archival data with little mention of talking to their Archivist colleagues or that the Archives are not interested in old research data.

The different approaches to managing paper and digital research data appear to be widening and I find myself being questioned on basic archival principles which is fine here as the RDM service is part of the Archives Service. We are also trying to ensure an equitable approach to the management of all research data, however I wonder how this research data is being managed without an Archivist’s input.

The Exchange of Experience will take place on Monday 16 November at LSHTM, to register please go to: http://research-data-management-and-archives.eventbrite.co.uk. Refreshments and a sandwich lunch are included. Please note that places are limited to 34 attendees.   Speakers will include myself and Anne Barrett from Imperial College and we are hoping that this will provide a forum for discussion, the idea is that this will be an interactive session.

As part of the discussion session, I would like to gather some evidence from the archive community on how involved Archivists are with RDM, please could you answer these questions and send them back to me so that I can collate the information, I will post an anonymised version to the list at a later date:
1.	Are you involved in RDM in your institution?
2.	If not, are you aware of your institution’s approach to RDM?
3.	Have you been excluded from RDM in your institution?
4.	Are you concerned about the different approaches to managing paper and digital research data in your institution?
5.	Are you concerned that the Library community is leading on RDM?
6.	Any other issues that you think should be discussed at this event

Best wishes

Victoria Cranna
Archivist & Records Manager
London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

Contact the list owner for assistance at [log in to unmask]

For information about joining, leaving and suspending mail (eg during a holiday) see the list website at
https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=archives-nra