Data description

• Documentation

• In order for your research data to be used properly by you, colleagues, and other researchers in the future you must ensure that there is proper documentation.  This might sound unnecessary and boring, but if you have ever had to go back to a piece of research at a later date you would have found that it takes quite some time and re-treading over old ground to bring yourself back up to speed with what it was you were doing.  Documentation helps to reduce this problem for yourself and makes your research more accessible to other researchers if or when you decide to share it.  

• Guidelines for describing Data Book
• Metadata

• In the following two books we look at creating metadata for different types of historical research.

• Documenting and accessing Oral History Data Book
• Documentation and Metadata for Quantitative History Book
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  DMP

  Re-visit your data management plan and add relevant content to sections 2 and 6 relating to the metadata and data description you will be keeping.   Add as much information as you are able to at this stage before moving onto the next part of this module.