Introduction to CARDIO

1. Introduction to CARDIO Joy Davidson Digital Curation Centre joy.davidson@glasgow.ac.uk http://cardio.dcc.ac.uk/ Funded by: This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 UK: Scotland License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/scotland/ ; or, (b) send a letter to Creative Commons, 543 Howard Street, 5th Floor, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.

2. What is the problem? Do you know: Whether your technical infrastructure is adequate (hardware, software, storage)? Who can provide support for various aspects of research data management (guidance, advice, training)? How research data management is sustained at your institution (policies, finances)? If not, how can you effectively plan to improve?

3. What is CARDIO? A freely available benchmarking tool to help assess strengths, weaknesses and gaps in RDM infrastructure Focus is on collaboration Created in a JISC funded IDMP support project in 2010

4. Why should you use CARDIO Helps to identify strengths, weaknesses and gaps in infrastructure Helps to identify areas where increased investment of time or money will be most beneficial Helps to identify objectives and priorities Allows you to benchmark progress over time

5. Who should be involved? Research support staff (ethics, FoI, library) Researchers (heads of department, research group leaders, PIs, RAs) Information services staff (IT, technical support) Central management (policy makers, budget holders, senior managers)

6. How does the process work? Coordinator registers and initiates assessment (if scale and nature of holdings isn’t known, run a DAF assessment first) Invites others to take part using CARDIO email notification (option to respond to all statements or just specific ones) Each respondent rates a series of statements relating to RDM infrastructure (technology, resources, organisation) Once each individual has entered their rating, they can then see others’ responses Chat function to allow disparities to be argued

7. How does the process work? Once consensus has been reached, coordinator concludes assessment Specific tasks for improvement are agreed and documented in CARDIO and re-assessment is scheduled to evaluate progress Results are presented in an automatically generated PDF report (customisable) including visuals Report shows where greater investment is needed; a useful tool for arguing the case with senior management

8. How long will it take? About 2-3 days for coordinator (scoping assessment and identifying participants, moderating process) Initial ratings from invited participants will require about 30-60 minutes (no need to provide evidence, but you an link to or upload supporting documents; main goal here is to identify perceptions) Reaching consensus may take longer depending on level of disagreement and response time.

9. Lessons and tips Hard to plan for improvement if you don’t know where you are starting from Confusion over what tools, software licenses and storage services available centrally Perceptions on support can vary greatly amongst stakeholders Keep the assessment small in scope – research group or department Provide visuals and evidence when making the case to senior management Plan to re-assess regularly – not a one-off activity!

10. Not sure you’re ready for a full assessment? Try our quick quiz in the latest issue of JISC Inform to see how your Research Data Infrastructure stacks up. http://www.jisc.ac.uk/inform/inform32/ResearchDataManagement.html

11. Discussion…. Do you know where you are now and where you want to be? Do you know how you’re going to get there? Who will be involved in reaching goals? How will you know if you’ve gotten to where you want to be?

12. Want more information or guidance on CARDIO? Please get in touch with us at info@dcc.ac.uk