Reading Diary: Data Management for Researchers: Organize, maintain and share your data for research success by Kristin Briney

Kristin Briney's Data Management for Researchers: Organize, maintain and share your data for research success is a book that should be on the shelf (physical or virtual) of every librarian, researcher and research administrator. Scientists, engineers, social scientists, humanists -- anyone who's work involves generating and keeping track of digital data. This is the book for you.

Like the title says -- data management for researchers. If you have data and you're a researcher, this is the book for you. Organize, maintain and share, the title says. If you're a researcher that needs to manage data, organizing, maintaining and sharing that data is exactly what you want to do.

And Kristin Briney is just the person to help. With a PhD in chemistry, you know she's been on the researcher side of the equation. And with a Master's in Library and Information Studies, you also know that she's studied the managing/organizing/sharing side of the equation and can bring deep insight and solid advice there too.

And that's the focus of the book -- insight and advice. Insight into the problems and issues around dealing with data and advice with how to deal with them.

The chapter topic areas give a good sense of the topics covered, so I don't have to go into detail with explanations of what's covered:

• The data problem
• The data lifecycle
• Planning for data management
• Documenting your data
• Organizing your data
• Improving data analysis
• Managing secure and private data
• Short-term storage
• Preserving and archiving your data
• Sharing/publishing your data
• Reusing data

Briney covers a lot of ground and goes into pretty deep detail for most areas. Inevitably, not every section will be equally relevant to every potential reader and not every detail or discussion will be new information to everyone. Given breadth of topics and the level of detail in each area and that Briney mostly starts each section from square one, this book will work for everyone at pretty well every skill level.

Some judicious skimming will be inevitable for most potential readers, as will perhaps some selective Googling for addition background information in certain area. Briney has you covered. In fact, an interesting way to deal with the detail might be by taking this book in two passes. The first pass to get a sense of the "universe of data things you need to know" and a second more focused on "what I need to know to survive my current situation." Whether that situation is a librarian hoping to build a data service, a PI hoping to get a little better at the things an onrushing funder mandate is going to require or a grad student ready to tackle their first real project, all the information you need is there. You just have to zero in on it.

That being said, the sections on data management plans, preserving & archiving and sharing data are all must-read sections for everyone. Making research data openly available where possible, for reuse and replication purposes, is an important goal for, in particular, all of science.

I recommend this book without hesitation for all academic libraries. Individual researchers, research administrators, funding agency employees and academic librarians would all find much useful information. Simply giving copy to new graduate students is probably a worthwhile investment at any institution.

Briney, Kristin. Data Management for Researchers: Organize, maintain and share your data for research success. Exeter, UK: Pelagic Publishing, 2015. 250pp. ISBN-13: 978-1784270117

(Review copy provided by publisher.)