CC BY

The Data Curation primers are documents used as a reference to curate research data within a specific discipline area or when using certain software or data types. They are developed during a series of workshops were attendees get input from a mentor of the Data Curator Network. The results are published in GitHub repositories. The GeoDatabase Data Curation Primer provides guidelines to manage and organize geographic data in geodatabases, to describe such data using geospatial metadata standards and which actions can be undertaken to preserve geospatial data in the long term.

This guideline helps researchers to use OneNote as an Electronic Laboratory Notebook (ELN). It provides tips to adapt OneNote to an ELN workflow with a focus on the biomedical sciences, which can be adjusted to other nonscientific ELNs. It covers several topics such as how to structure and label experiments, data acquisition and representation. It also provides relevant recommendations on how to approach data storage and security to comply with applicable legislation.

The University of Glasgow has prepared a detailed guideline on how to use Microsoft OneNote as a research notebook. It guides researchers from the initial steps of accessing the software and setting up a notebook, to more specific functionalities such as inserting tables, images, equations. It also provides information onhow to manage and share content.

The University of Glasgow run a work package between 2018 and 2019 to investigate the user requirements for Electronic Research Notebooks (ELNs). They organized a series of workshops to understand user needs, and run software trials to increase the interest and understand barriers inhibiting the uptake of ELNs. The results and conclusions of the exercise have now been published.

Data Carpentry has developed this course of data pre-processing with Open Refine, an open tool to work with data. The course covers several topics such as error correction and data formatting and harmonization.

ANDS has published a comprehensive guide about best practice for the publication and sharing of research data (in the Australian context). The guide helps researchers with the publishing phase of senstitive data with a step-by-step approach which covers several phases of the research data lifecycle. These steps are summarized in a decision tree.

Ghent University has elaborated an encryption manual for researchers. It begins with basic information about what encryption is and when is it needed. Then, it describes different encryption strategies and frames them into different scenarios, and provides step by step instructions for each of these scenarios.

The University of Helsinki created, upon request, a compact guide for researchers to help with research data documentation. It first introduces the basic elements of documentation, and then provides practical instructions and strategies to proceed with documentation during the research project, but also for the publishing phase.

The University of Glasgow has designed a LEGO® based game for 4-24 players to teach about metadata and reproducibility. In their own words: "The game addresses issues including planning for metadata, formats of metadata recording, standards and automation. The game also draws multiple parallels between recording and communicating the research process and documenting and the creation of a LEGO® model. The process of playing the game draws researchers into discussions on how metadata is captured, recorded and disseminated, which in turn provides an opportunity for signposting to further resources in this area."

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has developed a series of file organization handouts. The handout for version control briefly summarise different techniques for version control and provides an overview of the main differences between automatic change log platforms and tools.