A whole afternoon was devoted to research data management (RDM), a topic which is prominent in many librarians’ ‘to do’ lists. There are no funder policies for data sharing in India and the area is really only emerging as an area that needs to be discussed. The organisers added in a dedicated practical workshop session. It was attended by all participants and well received, with many participants noting that this was the first time that RDM for institutions had been discussed in India. Librarians wanted to see where and how they fitted in this new data landscape, and what they would need to do to get there.
The workshop
Running an interactive workshop with 150 people is something I have not done before, but with some planning, I ran 4 sessions across the 4 hr period. Following an introduction data management planning, I set out the nuts and bolts of research data management and sharing, and participants were asked to work in pairs, to complete a paper-based a quiz uae rcs data and an exercise where they were asked to support the drafting of a data management plan (DMP) for a research scenario. for who had completed a DMP or helped a researchers complete on, yielded only 2 raised hands, both from North America. There are no funder requirements for DMPs or data sharing in Indian research yet. The only policy, the 2012 NPDSA policy is aimed at the public sector in making non-sensitive data (open data) available, and it was in response to that high level policy that the Indina Council of Social Science Research ICSSR Data Service was initiated. (See my blog post about the ICSSR).