We love data

Have you ever tried to remember where you stored all these nuts for the winter and, after finally rediscovering them, found that part of them had sprouted into saplings, some had ended up in the digestive tracts of various critters and the rest were either dry and tasteless or belonged to your neighbour?

Well, probably not, as you’re not a squirrel storing nuts for winter. However, there are many similarities between squirrels and researchers, who often have to try to remember where a certain data file is that they haven’t looked at for a long time.

Managing and safeguarding your data can be as difficult a task as managing nuts is for a squirrel. If data is not handled properly, it goes forgotten, its context is lost, and the files might fall prey to bit rot or data degradation and thus become unreadable. 1 Trying to find, understand and restore lost data can drive even the most stoic scientist nuts.Click to tweet

This is where ETH Library comes in: We are your friendly neighbourhood elephant, with a very good memory and tips about how to handle those heaps of nuts… er… data.

ETH Library loves data in many ways – by providing them, taking care of their management, storage and preservation, helping them reach a wider audience and instructing their creators about how to best handle them. 2

Besides providing professional research data management, ETH Library offers support and training for researchers at ETH Zurich.Click to tweet Training courses 3 on information research, reference management, data management 4 , scientific writing and open access are also offered.
Tailor-made consulting 5 on the topic of research data management for groups and individuals is available at ETH Library as well. Furthermore, the library supports researchers during the creation of data management plans and advises them about how to comply with funders’ requirements.

ETH Library is also a provider of open data 6 . It networks its own metadata with data from other social and knowledge fields for linked open data and a semantic web.
Preservation of data is another important aspect of ETH Library’s portfolio. Researchers at ETH Zurich are expected to manage their data responsibly, following Good Scientific Practice as laid out in ETH Zurich’s Guidelines for Research Integrity 7 . By publishing research data in the Research Collection, ETH Zurich’s repository, the data are by default additionally preserved in the ETH Data Archive. You may check ETH Zurich’s current collection of archived research data on ETH Library’s website.

Last but not least, ETH Library offers informational material 8 for reference and self-study regarding archivable file formats, data management planning, and other questions concerning data management and preservation.

Researchers at ETH Zurich are important users of ETH Library. They create and work with data on a daily basis as it is essential for their research. Here is what some of them said when we asked why and how they love data:

Loving data is second nature to researchers and librarians, to name but a few professions.Click to tweet Everybody should love their data. This can start with something as simple as backing up your computer regularly to prevent data loss. If you would like to learn more about data degradation, our story “Surfing the sea of data. Handling data storage and preventing degradation” gives you six easy tips 14 to keep your data safe and thus to show how much you love your data.