[9] EUDAT research data management support for libraries

Among librarians and data managers, there is a growing awareness that the “rising tide of data” requires new approaches to data management and that data preservation, access and sharing should be supported in a seamless way. Data, and a fortiori Big Data, is a cross-cutting issue touching all research communities and infrastructures.

EUDAT’s vision is data shared and preserved across borders and disciplines and its mission is to enable data stewardship within and between European research communities through the EUDAT Collaborative Data Infrastructure. EUDAT offers a common model and service infrastructure for managing data spanning all European research data centres and community data repositories. EUDAT is the largest pan-European data infrastructure and is conceived as a network of collaborating, cooperating centres, combining the richness of numerous community-specific data repositories with the permanence and persistence of some of Europe’s largest scientific data and computing centres.

The EUDAT partnership is a network of 35 pan-European trusted organisations – data centres, HPC centres, and research institutions – all closely connected across Europe to offer scientific communities and users reliability, sustainability and confidence in the longevity of research data management services. In 2016, a 10-year agreement was signed by EUDAT service providers, guaranteeing long term sustainability to communities, infrastructures and their end-users. In addition, EUDAT relies on the best professional IT management practices in use to preserve data (multiple copies, back-up, and recovery plan).

Data managers and librarians across Europe but also globally are particularly important for the success of EUDAT. Librarians and data managers working at research libraries, national libraries, library organisations and information centres know what the researchers in their institutions need, and they are often the first point of contact for researchers with questions about safe storing and sharing of their research data. As such, they play a key role in improving the full lifecycle of research data management in their own institution and in Europe as a whole.

EUDAT offers a suite of research data management services to support data managers and librarians in their daily work and with their ever-increasing data management challenges. Covering both access and deposit, from informal data sharing to long-term archiving, and addressing identification, discoverability and computability of both long-tail and big data, EUDAT services aim to address the full lifecycle of research data. Libraries can join the collaborative data infrastructure to archive, replicate, process and catalogue data on behalf of their users.

For more information on EUDAT visit https://www.eudat.eu/

Bio: Vasso Kalaitzi works as an EU Project Communications Officer for LIBER. She is responsible for various project-related events and activities which have been assigned to LIBER in the context of the European Open Science Cloud Pilot Project and EUDAT and plays a key role in the promotion of these projects to people in the target communities. Vasso has extensive experience with EU Projects. She has been involved in several Projects already (MedOANet, PASTEUR4OA, RECODE, WIRE2014 amongst others) and has a thorough knowledge of the EU projects’ lifecycle and the communication and dissemination approaches to be followed. She has considerable experience in developing and implementing communication strategies, as well as in project management and quality assessment tools, policies and procedures. Her interests lay in the alignment and dissemination of Open Access policies, Open Science and the engagement of relevant stakeholders, in order to make scientific research and data accessible to all levels of society. She believes that Open Science is the key to improving the transparency and validity of research, and the best way to communicate scientific knowledge. She also cares about growth, business and innovation management, political science and open government policies. Vasso holds a BSc in Political Science & Public Administration and a Diploma in Cultural Units Management from National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and an Executive MSc in European Studies from Athens University of Economics and Business.