Data Plan Essentials
March 28th, 2011
What’s a data plan?
Data plans for a study or project:
- describe which data will be kept and for how long
- explain how data will be formatted and described for reuse and interpretation
- make clear policies around data access, use, and attribution/copyright
- are a required component of proposals for funding with several federal agencies. See the University of Minnesota’s comprehensive list of national agency data-plan requirements.
Examples
- Sample data plan for the Lakeshore Nature Preserve
- Sample data plan for an educational games research project
Resources
| Resource | Description |
|---|---|
| What's Your Data Plan? | Our digital data-plan guide for hard science and quantitative social science |
| Preserving Your Digital Heritage | Our guide for planning to preserve digital collections from the humanities and interpretive social sciences |
| Data Management and Publishing | The MIT Library’s guide to managing data and creating a data plan |
| Digital Preservation Management | The Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) tutorial on data preservation |
| Conducting a Data Interview | Ten quick questions about research data, from Purdue University. |
| Escaping Datageddon | Our presentation on data-management essentials. Contact us if you'd like us to give this presentation for you! |