The Realities of Research Data Management Part One: A Tour of the Research Data Management (RDM) Service Space. Rebecca Bryant, Senior Program Officer; Brian Lavoie, Research Scientist; Constance Malpas, Strategic Intelligence Manager & Research Scientist.

“Research data is fundamental to scholarly inquiry, providing the raw material for empirical investigation and inference. The scale of research data sets and the technologies used to generate them have changed dramatically over time—compare, for example, the astronomical observations recorded by Tycho Brahe in the sixteenth century with a sextant and quadrant to those of the massive Sloan Digital Sky Survey four hundred years later—culminating in the wide-spread adoption of new, Big Data-driven modes of research. This development, combined with an emerging array of data-intensive computational research techniques in the humanities and social sciences, has changed the face of research data in 21st-century scholarship, and, by extension, the process of assembling, managing and curating research data as well. In addition to changes in the scale and prevalence of research data itself, other factors have channeled attention to the importance of research data management. The scholarly record is evolving into a deeper, more comprehensive documentation of scholarly activity, extending beyond reporting results in journal articles and monographs to include a range of scholarly outputs generated both during the research process and in the aftermath of publication…”