Data Curation & Management Toolkit: Standards, Guidelines, Best Practices

Metadata Standards

To facilitate preservation and long-term access to archived data collections, you must create data documentation and associated metadata.

Metadata standards…

• Facilitate interoperability of data collections.
• Standardize ways to organize data, provide background information and show methods of use.
• Help data citation, discovery, and reuse.

Different disciplines have different metadata standards, Researchers can choose the standards that meet their needs. Digital Curation Centre from the UK has maintained lists of metadata standards, profiles, and extensions, cases and tools covering these areas:

• Biology
• Earth Science
• Physical Science
• Social Science & Humanities
• General Research Data

Research Data Management Guidelines

Organizations and institutions have provided valuable guidelines for research data management, e.g.:

• How-to Guides from the Digital Curation Centre, UK
• Data Management Guide from the University of Cambridge, UK
• The Realities of Research Data Management from OCLC

Research Data Management Best Practices

• UK Data Archive – Create & Manage Data (PDF)
• Australian National Data Service – Data Management Guides
• Oak Ridge National Laboratory – Data Management for Data providers (PDF)
• Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) – Guide to Social Science Data Preparation and Archiving (PDF)
• DataOne – Data Management Guide for Public Participation in Scientific Research (PDF)

Research Integrity Resources

•  This portal gathers policies, guidelines and training information on research integrity and ethics at HKUST.