UpDate - Vol. 13, No. 29, Page 8
April 28, 1994
TechTalk
Research Data Management Services will open May 16

     University researchers can soon look to one place to find the data
they need, and that data-discovery process will be both easier and faster.
     Designed to enhance the quality of the campus research environment,
the University's new Research Data Management Services (RDMS) is the center
of a cooperative coalition of several departments on campus concerned with
collecting, accessing and managing data.
     The RDMS Data Center, located in 013 Smith Hall, will begin operation
May 16 with an open house for the University community.
     The Data Center will serve as the "hub of a multi-spoked operation,"
Dick Sacher, RDMS coordinator, said. It will acquire and maintain important
data sets, provide a method to help people find data and make that data
easy to use.
     The center will maintain a large number of data sets, including those
from the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research
(ICPSR) and the U.S. Census Bureau. While the emphasis has been on data for
social and policy sciences, the center now is involved in helping
researchers to find and acquire data in other areas, including earth and
natural sciences.
     RDMS also will point people to data resources and to research
expertise both on campus and in state and federal agencies. In addition to
membership in ICPSR, the University belongs to the Association of Public
Data Users (APDU) and the Open GIS Foundation.
     As a State Data Center Affiliate of the U.S. Census Bureau, the center
maintains contacts with the Delaware Geological Survey, Center for Applied
Demography and Survey Research, Center for Remote Sensing, Ocean
Information Center, Statistical Laboratory and the University of Delaware
Library.
     At the new center, for example, a University researcher would be able
to make on-line, full-text searches of the studies in the ICPSR collection.
Data sets often can be ordered at no cost to the researcher, can be
obtained on various media and, in some cases, are available by direct
contact with a remote computer through the Internet.
     Descriptions of thousands of major data sets are available on line
through U-Discover! By searching this resource, researchers can locate data
on campus or anywhere in the world, significantly shortening the time they
spend in the initial stages of such a project. These stages include
locating raw data, acquiring it and then organizing it before even
beginning the seminal work of analysis.
     Center equipment includes two Pentium-class workstations with
2.5-gigabyte hard drives, CD-ROM readers and large-screen monitors. Color X
terminals also are available.
     At workstations of this capacity, researchers can take a very large
data set from a CD-ROM, extract relevant information, analyze it with a
statistical program-such as SPSS or SAS-on the PC, and then save the
information on a disk. All Data Center machines are connected to the campus
network, so researchers can put their data wherever they want for the rest
of the analysis.
     In addition to Sacher, center staff includes Roseann Hayes, consultant
for Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and Larry Hotchkiss, consultant
for statistical packages and the University's official representative to
ICPSR. Hardware support is provided by Steve Timmins and tape support is
provided by Suzanne Goodrich.
     RDMS will eventually add part-time graduate research assistants, drawn
from departments that make heavy use of data in their research. These
students will help meet the growing demand for consulting and other
services; at the same time, they will acquire valuable experience in their
fields.
     Initially, the center will be open from 9 a.m.-5 p.m., weekdays.
     To learn more about RDMS on line in U-Discover! Select:
        Computing and Technology
          Machine-Readable Data Resources
     This directory contains the formal proposal for developing RDMS and
the Data Center, data from the U.S. Census Bureau, ICPSR data set
descriptions, economic and financial data, statistical software information
and newsgroups, and much more.
                                                  -Ann Amsler