Research Data Management in Agricultural Sciences - Advanced module: Data documentation - Trainingmaterial

As part of the series ‘Tailored Research Data Management Training for Agricultural Scientists’ in cooperation between FAIRagro, the Consortium for the Agrosystems Research Community of the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) and the Research Data Service of the University of Kassel, an in-depth workshop on Data documentation was held at 10^th of December 2024, which specifically addressed the special features for agricultural scientists.

In this in-depth workshop, participants learned why and how properly documenting their data can benefit them and their future research life, as well as others. The key questions were answered:

Why Data Documentation?

What to Document?

Which Method for Data Documentation?

Which tools are usable for Documentation?

How to increase metadata interoperability?

Therefore, we covered methods such as README files, data dictionaries, commented code, metadata and metadata standards, tools such as electronic lab notebooks and electronic field books, and concepts such as persistent identifiers and controlled vocabularies. We also took a closer look at examples of particular interest to agricultural researchers, such as MIAPPE and AGROVOC.

This publication is intended to enable the subsequent use of the teaching materials and includes this README file, which also functions as a navigation aid for the individual files. The Teachingscript (in German only), helps with the conception, division of labour and timing of the introductory lecture. This and the presentation slides are available in various formats for easy reuse.

Target group of the workshop: Researchers, focus on young scientists

Competence level: Basic level, Intermediate level

Domain: Agricultural sciences

Duration: 2 h

Learning resource type: Presentation slides, teaching script

Formats: pdf, pptx, odp, xlsx, ods