UK Research Data Discovery

About the project

The aim of this project was to develop a UK-wide discovery service that enables the discovery and reuse of UK research data held in UK research institutions and subject data centres, and which could be taken forward into a service run by Jisc.

This project developing a UK Research Data Discovery Service built on an initial pilot project by the Digital Curation Centre and the UK Data Archive in 2013-2014.

The project also had a third phase of work, whereby the harvesting of metadata was widened across more UK universities and data centres during 2017. During the second phase of work (2014-2016), we:

  • Developed and agreed requirements and use cases for a UK Research Data Discovery Service.
  • Built on the existing stakeholder engagement across UK universities and data centres, engaging nine universities and six data centres.
  • Developed and agreed the metadata profile for a successful cross disciplinary service, and mapped this to the various metadata schemas used by data centres and repositories.
  • Developed a functioning service instance (alpha).
  • Harvested metadata of participating data centres and university repositories into the service instance.

UK Data Service contribution

  • Principal Investigator: Veerle Van den Eynden, UK Data Service
  • Funder: Jisc
  • Dates: November 2014 – July 2016

Partners

  • Digital Curation Centre: Diana Sisu, Laura Molloy, Alex Ball, David Wilson, Kevin Ashley
  • Jisc: Christopher Brown, Catherine Grout, Rachel Bruce
  • UK Data Archive: Lucy Bell, John Shepherdson, Anne Etheridge
  • Archaeology Data Centre: Katie Green, Michael Charno, Paul Young
  • NERC Data Catalogue Service: Peter Vodden, Philip Trembath
  • ISIS/ICAT, STFC: Tom Griffin, Catherine Jones
  • Visual Arts Data Service: Leigh Garrett, Carlos Silca, Amy Robinson
  • Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre: Ian Bruno, Matthew Lightfoot
  • STFC Energy Data Centre: Jim Halliday
  • University of Hull: Chris Awre
  • University of St Andrews: Anna Clements
  • University of Glasgow: Valerie McCutcheon
  • Oxford Brookes University: Rowena Rouse, Sarah Taylor
  • University of Edinburgh: Robin Rice, Stuart Lewis
  • University of Oxford: Sally Rumsey, Amanda Flynn, David Tomkins
  • University of Southampton: Wendy White, Adrian Cox, Michael Whitton
  • University of Leeds: Rachel Proudfoot, Graham Blyth
  • University of Lincoln: Paul Stainthorp, Andrew Beeken