The Data Management Workbook: Practical Exercises for Better Organization, Storage and Use of Your Research Data

by Kristin Briney

Overview

If you want to manage your research data better but don’t know where to begin, this short workbook will help you get started!

The Data Management Workbook helps researchers design useful data-management plans through a step-by-step series of structured exercises, worksheets and checklists, including:

- creating a data dictionary

- evaluating a lab notebook

- finding the best way to organize your files

- setting up useful file naming conventions

- writing effective README.txt files

- selecting the right data repository

- determining data stewardship

- preparing data for future use

Suitable for researchers working in many different disciplines, this guide also shows how to customize data-management plans to better fit your individual workflows, methodologies, laboratories and datasets. Author Kristin Briney builds on the foundations in her previous book, Data Management for Researchers, to help bridge the gap between understanding the principles and being able to implement data management as part of your research practice.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781784275747
Publisher:	Pelagic Publishing
Publication date:	12/02/2025
Series:	Research Skills
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	114
File size:	6 MB

About the Author

Kristin Briney is the Biology & Biological Engineering Librarian at the California Institute of Technology. She is the author of Data Management for Researchers and coauthor, with Becky Yoose, of Managing Data for Patron Privacy. She has a PhD in chemistry and an MLIS, both from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She specializes in research data management, institutional data policy, and patron privacy with respect to library data handling. Kristin is an advocate for the adoption of the international date standard ISO 8601 (YYYY-MM-DD) and likes to spend her free time making data visualizations out of yarn.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Introduction

1.1 What is Data Management?

1.2 The Research Data Lifecycle

1.3 Why Do Data Management?

1.4 Using This Book to Manage Your Data Better

Chapter 2. Documentation

Exercise 2.1: Evaluate a Laboratory/Research Notebook

Exercise 2.2: Document Project Information

Exercise 2.3: Create a Data Dictionary

Exercise 2.4: Build a Documentation Template

Chapter 3. File Organization and Naming

Exercise 3.1: Set up a File Organization System

Exercise 3.2: Create a File Naming Convention

Chapter 4. Data Storage and Security

Exercise 4.1: Pick Storage and Backup Systems

Exercise 4.2: Test Your Backup

Exercise 4.3: Create a Strong Passphrase

Chapter 5. Data Management Planning and Policies

Exercise 5.1: Write a Data Management Plan for a Funding Application

Exercise 5.2: Write a Living Data Management Plan

Exercise 5.3: Identify Applicable Data Policies

Exercise 5.4: Determine Data Stewardship

Chapter 6. Data Sharing

Exercise 6.1: Make a Spreadsheet more Accessible and Reusable

Exercise 6.2: Write a README File for Shared Data

Exercise 6.3: Write Alt Text for a Data Visualization

Exercise 6.4: Pick a Data Repository for Sharing

Exercise 6.5: Select a License for Your Shared Data

Exercise 6.6: Share Data

Exercise 6.7: Cite a Publicly Available Dataset

Chapter 7. Project Wrap-up

Exercise 7.1: Convert Data File Types

Exercise 7.2: Create an “Archive” Folder

Exercise 7.3: Prepare Data for Future Use

Exercise 7.4: Separate from Your Institution

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

The Data Management Workbook is packed full of useful advice and exercises to plan research data management in any type of empirical research. I can see it being a very useful resource for researchers, and for those that support them such as research data librarians and data stewards. It's concise, readable, practical, and highly relatable.

— Andrew Cox, author of Exploring Research Data Management

As a researcher wanting to better manage your data, it is easy to feel overwhelmed by not knowing where to start or how to organize plans into manageable tasks. With The Data Management Workbook, Kristin has broken down common data management needs into a set of tasks that any team can work through to accomplish their data management goals. Through a series of exercises that include checklists, templates, examples, and procedures, this book will help you successfully get yourself, your team, and your project organized in order to have more usable data.

— Crystal Lewis, author of Data Management in Large-Scale Education Research

A great book that covers why data management matters, but more importantly, also offers hands-on practice exercises to help you improve how you save, document and interact with your own data. It would be an excellent book for labs to go through together to build skills and pipelines that work for the entire team.

— Kate Laskowski, Associate Professor of Evolution and Ecology, University of California, Davis

The Data Management Workbook is perfect for students and early career researchers who are short on time. Its straightforward, easy-to-understand exercises allow researchers in any field, at any level of expertise, to learn how to manage their data efficiently and effectively.

— Julia Bauder author of Teaching Research Data Management

Kristin Briney's newest publication offers a practical guide to implementing the core principles of data management. The goal of data management is to make implicit assumptions explicit. Briney's exercises provide guidance for articulating the critical and foundational work that is often assumed, and she does so in a lively and accessible manner. In addition to guiding researchers and librarians, this workbook, combined with her first book, Data Management for Researchers, could serve as a basis for a graduate-level course on data management.

— Lynda Kellam, author of Databrarianship: The Academic Data Librarian in Theory and Practice

Most researchers will acknowledge that data management is important, but it’s the details and the daily practices that trip them up. The Data Management Workbook takes us from knowing to doing and provides concrete exercises to build the habits, practices and skills we need to better preserve, document and store our note, data and analyses at all steps in the research process. I can’t wait to use this in my lab!

— Christie Bahlai, Associate Professor of Biological Sciences, Kent State University