Data Services
Data Services at the University at Albany are a coordinated effort between the University Libraries, Information Technology Services (ITS), and the Data Management and Analytics Center (DMAC), in collaboration with the Division for Research, Office of General Counsel, and others.
We provide support for finding, managing, analyzing, and sharing and preserving your research data.
Find Data
Our subject librarians can help you with disciplinary-specific data repository queries.
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Registry of Research Data Repositories is an interdisciplinary registry of data repositories with global coverage. Use this when starting a project and for guidance finding data.
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Data.gov provides data, tools, and resources to conduct research with the U.S. Government’s open data. UAlbany’s Government Information Research Guides provide additional sources.
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ICPSR is an archive of social and behavioral science data. UAlbany is an institutional member. If you would like to access (or deposit) data there and have questions, contact Elaine Lasda.
Additionally, DMAC staff can help faculty and research staff obtain data from both governmental and commercial data vendors. The team also assists with negotiating terms with data vendors.
Manage Data
Create a Data Management Plan
Data management planning and data sharing are often required obligations of grant funding. A journal's data sharing policy may require your research data and underlying code is made publicly available as a show of commitment to reproducibility efforts.
Create data management plans with DMPTool, a free online application, which has a helpful Quick Start Guide
Contact us about DMPTool or to
have your data management plan reviewed
[NB: Please expect a week’s turnaround time.]
Additional Resources
As you start to think about organizing and describing your data you may also find some of these resources helpful:
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Cornell’s Research Data Management Service Group’s data management best practices, which offer guidelines for data citation, file format and management, and more.
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ICPSR’s Guide to Social Science Data Preparation and Archiving, “a compilation of best practices gleaned from the experience of many archivists and investigators.”
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MIT Libraries’ guides to documenting data and and MIT Libraries’ guides to organizing data.
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NISO’s Research Data Management Primer, which aims to introduce researchers to the basics of data management.
Manage Secure Datasets
ITS advises faculty about data security and storage options.
The Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) must approve the management plan for any secure dataset. The office of the CISO is available to consult on data use agreements as needed, as the CISO is the signatory authority for any secure dataset. All datasets should be classified using the CISO data classification standards.
Collect and Document Data
DMAC can provide support with survey data collection as well as qualitative and mixed methods approaches.
DMAC and the Libraries offer data documentation support (e.g., metadata and “read-me” consultations), so critical for finding, using, sharing, and preserving data. To help get you started, you may want to explore the following:
Contact Scholarly Communications for additional support.
Store and Analyze your Data
ITS provides 10 TB of shared storage for research groups and a 10-GB home directory quota, accessible either on personal computers or the general purpose cluster. ITS manages local high-performance computing (HPC), including a 22-node research cluster for general purpose use. All researchers at the university can leverage this instrument to enable scientific discovery. See real-time cluster availability.
ITS offers personalized help including grant costing, data analytics or visualization collaboration, software installation on the cluster, and resource optimization support, along with other support services.
All faculty at the University have free access to XSEDE, a National Science Foundation-funded HPC system that scientists can use to interactively share computing resources, data, and expertise. There are two XSEDE Campus Champions who can help you get started, Dr. Nicholas Schiraldi (ITS, nschiraldi@albany.edu ) and Kevin Tyle (DAES, ktyle@albany.edu ).
In collaboration with ITS, DMAC provides storage and security support for research projects.
Forthcoming Workshops
coming soon
Get Support
Please contact us with any questions you may have. We are here to help.
About Us
Data Services at the University at Albany are a coordinated effort between the University Libraries, Information Technology Services (ITS), and the Data Management and Analytics Center (DMAC), in collaboration with the Division for Research, Office of General Counsel, and others.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank MIT Libraries’ Data Management Service , Cornell’s Research Data Management Service Group , UNH’s Data Management Toolkit , NYU Libraries’ Data Services , and UC Santa Cruz Library’s Research Data Management guide for the open licensing of their content, which we used to build this resource for the UAlbany community.