The Institutional Data Management Blueprint (IDMB) project ran during the JISC Managing Research Data programme 2009-2011. The team, based at the University of Southampton, developed a suite of re-usable tools and templates for institutional data management. These were designed to provide a framework for the seamless integration of research data management into the workflows of all those involved in the data lifecycle. It is important that the community build on work such as this rather than unnecessary re-invention of the wheel (a consistent standard across institutions would be no bad thing either), and with this in mind we will be looking at how the IDMB toolkit can be used in our work on the Research Data at Essex project. This also provides a more general comment on its potential for use in similar scenarios at other institutions. There are several parts to the IDMB ‘blueprint’, which I will discuss over a series of blog posts as the project progresses.
In this post we will be looking at metadata. Based on close work with a pilot department at the University of Southampton, the blueprint proposes a three part metadata model for documenting research data. We like this model, and have developed our own (working) version of this model (see diagram below). Functionally the two models are similar, the most significant difference being that ours detaches all discipline-specific metadata from EPrints formal schemas. Based on another recommendation of the IDMB project, this allows the user to upload their own discipline specific metadata as a separate file - a flexible and pragmatic approach we feel.