It’s not often you start reading a book or even an article or anything really about research data management and find yourself smiling. Briney injects a little humour at the beginning then starts with a real-life, relatable example of data management gone wrong. She immediately had me wanting to know more. So I went back and ran my eye over the contents page which contains everything I realised I wanted to know about this topic – plus it’s arranged in a clear and logical order. The intended audience is academic researchers who produce research data. The intention of the book is to show them first why they should be interested in research data management, then how to adequately devise a plan. Briney goes above and beyond in meeting this objective. While perfectly suited for the academic researcher with a practical need to know, the book is also very relevant for the library professional supporting the academic researcher.
The writing style is unambiguous enough for novices but also meaty enough for the more seasoned academic (or information professional). Information presented is highly relevant and of an extremely practical nature. The first few chapters define what is meant by research data and data management and explore the reasons why researchers should spend the time to manage their data. The idea of the data management plan is gently introduced at the beginning of the first chapter. Chapter 2 introduces and builds the argument for academics to share their research data with other researchers and to facilitate a framework to do this easily. Briney provides the reader with different versions of the Data Lifecycle to illustrate the potential for re-use of data across multiple applications. Chapter 3, ‘Planning for data management’, highlights some of the issues involved, including the need for adherence to policies, privacy, copyright, retention policies, ownership and sharing of data. Chapter 4 is about documentation. At this stage, the author gets hard hitting discussing the need for a high standard of documentation, the implementation of protocols, metadata and adherence to standards. Chapter 5 discusses methods for data organisation. Chapter 6 speaks to preparing the data for analysis. Chapter 7 discusses sensitive data and the importance of dealing with it appropriately. Researchers are then reminded of the all-important issues of storage and backing up their data in Chapter 8. Chapter 9 takes a long-term look at data storage and preservation. In Chapter 10 sharing data is revisited, this time in more depth. Chapter 11 talks about re-use of research data and the inevitable restarting of the data lifecycle. This text is highly logical and extremely relevant at a time when most Australian higher education institutes are generating policy, plans and procedures around data management. This book is highly recommended, if not essential, for all researchers producing data.
RMIT University
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© 2016 Wendy Frerichs
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00048623.2016.1262736