da blog

I’m writing this whilst listening to Michael Day of UKOLN talk about preservation as one component of the data curation lifecycle espoused by the DCC. He is one of a number of people invited by the DCC to give lectures and create exercises as part of the pilot of DCC 101, a course aimed at researchers and the data curators who work with them.

I’m here because I was invited to speak this morning about Ingest, the previous stage in the lifecycle. That was followed by a stimulating set of exercises developed and led by Suzanne Embury which got attendees to think about data quality and the varied measures we might use for it. Suzanne’s exercise was based on work by Wang and Strong (“Beyond accuracy: what data quality means for data consumers”) which starts from the premise that we can never directly measure data quality – rather, we must construct measures which are proxies for quality, or measure only one facet of it. This was new work to me, but it was reassuring to see that it fitted very well with my own experience and with what I know of the ways in which others have approached quality in data. Their original paper took 176 measures of data quality and condensed them into 15 generic aspects of quality. Not all are applicable to all settings, and part of the exercise today got our students considering which were appropriate to them and how they might measure them. This struck me as being particularly useful, as it provides a formal means for deciding which aspects of quality are important to your consumers. Effort can then be focussed on dealing with those aspects well, and not wasting effort on areas that are of lesser relevance, or for which measures are difficult to establish.

The DCC 101 looks to be a promising addition to the canon of training and education in digital curation. We’re looking forward to working with Joy Davidson and her colleagues at the DCC to explore how our training provision and theirs can complement, rather than compete with, each other. There are plans to discuss these issues at a workshop following the IDCC this year, and I’m interested in opinions from a wider audience that would help inform our discussions. If you are a potential attendee at one or more of these training courses, would it help you to see them more integrated ? Do you find it easy to identify the training and education that best suits you at present, and what could improve that situation ? If you are responsible for staff that may need training now and in the future, what type of training provision best suits you and your organisation and what constraints – budgets, time, place – should we all be aware of ? Responses as comments to this post, or by email, would help us all greatly to plan future training that will meet the community’s needs.

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