Spaced Out ::

I wanted to highlight the 2015 International Data Rescue Award in the Geosciences which is run by and IEDA and Elsevier. As they say on the site, IDRA was created to to raise awareness of the importance of securing access to science’s older research data, particularly those with poor preservation outlook or fragile storage conditions, and to urge efforts towards creating robust electronic datasets that can be shared globally.

This is something I have long had an interest in, going back to terrain modelling I undertook for my MSc and MSc degrees. In particular it was a focus of my PhD where I looked at a range of published and unpublished materials on the former Irish ice sheet. Some time after my PhD (!) I realised there was a dataset of striae observations of considerable size and this led the the compilation, mapping and publication along with subsequent interpretation of the data. This then formed one of the examples used in my recent paper on data rescue in geomorphology.

It’s worth looking at the introductory section to the GeoResJ paper (see below) as it covers some more general ground about what we consider to be data rescue (and something I also blogged on)… I’m not going to repeat it here, but it’s salient to note that it’s anything we lose “access” to. For example I blogged about try to make PDFs of my MSc Thesis available and how, in the space of 20 years, this particular file format is near obsolete (but not quite unreadable). Flipping this on it’s head, what formats should we storing data in? Within the context of spatial data, I blogged about this a little while ago and much of this remains pertinent today. Indeed, the topic of preservation is so important that research council projects need to have a data deposition plan - however this is often file format agnostic and really a well conceived plan should take this in to consideration as well. At Wageningen University, all research students need to come up with a data management plan as part of their research - an important element.

The take away… if nothing else consider how you might use data collected as part of your research in the future and that is both in the physical media it is stored on and the format it is stored in.