Friday 21 September 2012

Researcher participation: a clever strategy from UWS

At the Metadata Stores roundtable in Sydney on the 31st August 2012, Susan Robbins (University of Western Sydney) outlined a clever strategy for getting researcher participation. Susan has kindly agreed to share:

'Our Research office selected about 30 key UWS researchers, from a range of subject areas, who had recently completed ARC or NHMRC grants (with possible data). To the spreadsheet, they added grant details and attached an associated publication. They sent this to me for information and to our DVC Research. The DVC emailed the researchers outlining the project, reasons why they should participate (and strongly urged them to do so) and said I would be in touch to discuss details.

I emailed the researchers the next day with some more information, including the specific grants identified by the Research Office and attaching the publication. About half the researchers emailed me back within a few days. About half of the rest had out of office messages and most have since been in touch and the rest didn’t ever respond. I made appointments to ring or visit the respondents (with a colleague) to discuss the project in more detail and what their participation would involve. Every single one agreed to participate.

The Library has access to a lot of the information required for the questionnaire, so we pre-populated it as much as possible. It was then emailed back to the researcher with the option to either complete and return or ring us to fill in the missing information. Most chose to do it themselves and send it back to us. There was usually a couple of emails/calls back and forth. This proved a popular way to participate as it meant less disruption for the researcher.'

Thank you Susan. If you need more details, you can contact her at: S.ROBBINS@uws.edu.a

Wednesday 5 September 2012

Metadata Stores Community News #7

  1. New guidance for D4 (NLA/Trove Identifiers)
    Connecting researchers to their data is much easier if researchers are uniquely identified. ANDS partnership with the National Library of Australia (NLA) to develop a National Party Infrastructure to provide persistent Identifiers for people and groups (Parties) is realised in Deliverable 4: demonstrated alignment of records about Parties with the ARDC Party Infrastructure…

    In response to your requests for a more quantitative goal for D4, ANDS recommends that Metadata Stores projects aim to:
    • include NLA Party Identifiers for the ARC/NMHRC grant investigators that have been started after 1st January 2009 and that you create and maintain NLA identifiers for the researchers whose research data is already published in Research Data Australia (RDA);
    • (…for those wanting to extend the reach of their projects) include Party Identifiers for grant recipients for the last 10 years. This extended coverage will enable institutions to develop a richer research portfolio based on award history.

    A recent survey 16 universities with Metadata Stores projects by Amir Aryani (ANDS) indicates that the numbers of Grant Investigators (2007-2010 - where investigators are counted once for each institution) should be easily manageable. Examples: RMIT 76, Deakin University 57, Griffith University 127,
  2. ReDBox collaboration meeting in South Australia
    A meeting is scheduled for 10am on Friday September 7 in the eResearch VisLab, Room 119 in the Physics Building at the University of Adelaide to discuss a possible collaboration around the mandatory deliverables as well as Integration with Research Master. For more details contact Andrew Williams [andrew.williams@ands.org.au] mobile: +61 410 221 647.
  3. 3 Minute Video: Duncan Dickinson describing ReDBox

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