These training materials are part of a five-part course aimed at early career researchers on FAIR Research Data Management (RDM). We share these materials so that research data professionals can reuse them in their instructions or training sessions.

The main theme of this course are the FAIR principles: sharing research data that are Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable.

The FAIR RDM course is intended to be flexible and modular: we invite users to (re)use and adapt those parts that are suitable for their audience.

Sessions 1-3 of this course are aimed at absolute beginners: that is, those who likely have knowledge of research processes in general but are new to research data management and the FAIR principles. Sessions 4-5 are aimed at an intermediate level: those who have completed the first three modules and/or already have some existing knowledge of FAIR RDM.

The training session ‘A deeper dive into putting FAIR RDM into practice. Part 1’ was piloted in September 2024 as the fourth session of the 'FAIR Research Data Management' 5-session course (beginner and intermediate level). The course was developed and piloted as part of the PATTERN project (https://www.pattern-openresearch.eu/).

In ‘A deeper dive into putting FAIR RDM into practice. Part 1’ we start with an overview of the topics covered in session 1, 2 and 3. This forms the starting point of the topics covered in this session at “intermediate level”: these are (1) metadata and knowledge organization systems” (that maps to all of the FAIR principles) and (2) Persistent identifiers (that maps to the “F” and “A” principles).

Topic 1 - Metadata

Libraries, archives, museums have a long history of creating and sharing robust, structured metadata. Card catalogs were the first metadata management systems based on the MARC metadata standard. Online bibliographic information systems are based on the card catalogs. Another prominent metadata standard, Dublin Core, aimed at “resource discovery on the web” is introduced and its relevance is explained.

As an exercise the learners are asked to share examples of metadata standards that are used in their community. For these they can use online metadata catalogs as information sources.

Three types of  metadata are introduced: administrative md, descriptive md and structural md. Then an overview of how metadata is generated is covered (from handmade until AI generated metadata).

Topic 2 Persistent identifiers

What is the relevance of PIDs: to mitigate “link rot” and “content drift” and to enable the creation of a “PID graph”. The PID graph links research entities such as databases, publications, projects, etc based on the PIDs of the objects.

PIDs are not persistent by magic. The “PID ecosystem” is presented. Actors such as “PID services” and “PID managers” are introduced and discussed.

The last topic of the session concerns the ways PIDs for research entities can be realized.

A short evaluation and wrap-up of the session finalizes the session.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this session, learners will be able to:

1.  Understand role and function of metadata in FAIR RDM
   
2. Understand the relevance of Knowledge Organisation Systems
   
3. Know which metadata formats are relevant for your scientific discipline
   
4. Understand the role and function of PIDs in FAIR RDM
   
5. Have a basic understanding of the “PID ecosystem”
   
6. Know how to apply PIDs to different types of research outputs

Project work: 

An important component of these training sessions was project work that was conducted on the Projects platform (https://pattern.projects.directory/), which you will see references to throughout the slideshows in this series. We asked learners to do some exercises that are based on real research projects that produced and archived data some time in the past.  Eight 'use cases' were created, and participants chose one that mached their interests to work on for the duration of the course. From the first session onwards, they then worked on these 'use cases' in the Projects platform, with regular 'check ins' with other learners during the live training sessions. The eight use cases have been uploaded to Zenodo separately. 

File overview:

20240924_Pattern_FAIR_RDM_Session4_Slides: The central slideshow for this 2 hour training session

20240924_Pattern_FAIR_RDM_Session4_SessionPlan: the document that we created to plan and manage the training session, which we believe will be useful for potential reusers of the content

Slideshows are uploaded in .pptx and .pdf format and text documents are uploaded in both .docx and .pdf 

Related records:

Session 1: 10.5281/zenodo.15310232

Session 2: 10.5281/zenodo.15310356

Session 3: 10.5281/zenodo.15310456

Session 5: 10.5281/zenodo.15310556

Use Cases for FAIR RDM: 10.5281/zenodo.15316306