Why we need Data Curation Days

It is vitally important to organise and curate data and reagents in the lab, as described in data management plan and where data belongs. It’s also essential to update lab notebooks.

No-one is perfect and it can be tempting to procrastinate/postpone these tasks. For that reason, we organise data curation days every 1-3 months to make sure they happen.

Thanks to Andrew Millar and Karrera Djoko for explaining data curation days. They were emphatic about the importance of cake and/or hot chocolate to the success of the process.

How a Data Curation Day works

Practicalities:

• Scheduled at least 1 week in advance, announced on slack and lab calendar.
• Usually run from 10am to 3:30pm, breaking for lunch.
• No other work to be done during data curation day: data curation only.
• Data curation is work.
• PI orders cake for the office.
• Someone volunteers to make coffee for 10am.
• The day starts by everyone sharing their goals for data curation day. Usually this is as a stand-up post.
• Discuss with others and make plans for joint data curation in advance if possible.
• Update at end of day with which goals were achieved and any loose ends.
• PI also agrees to buy a pint for anyone who wants one after work.

Data curation could include:

• anything that helps us organise any of our data.
• plasmid info.
• strain info.
• submission of RNA-seq data to GEO.
• cleaning up and/or documenting datastore.
• new releases of github repos, minting dois on figshare, etc.
• writing README files for datastore folders or github directories.
• any other data archiving.
• updating lab notebooks.
• adding to or updating lab manual.
• updating lab website.
• discussion of how we should organise data and materials.
• freezer organisation and documentation.
• and so on…

What about lab cleanups?

Data curation day is sort of the dry lab equivalent of a wet lab cleanup. We occasionally have lab cleanups. We don’t yet have a manual page for lab cleanups.