Data Management Tips
Data-Intensive Research Projects
Most technical studies tend to focus on a single object or a small group of objects. For collection-wide studies or technical surveys, data management can get complicated. Information adds up faster and gets disorganized more quickly than you’d expect! For collection-wide research projects—even small-scale surveys—a data management plan is a must, as are guidelines to help students and research assistants follow your plan.
For “Investigating Color in Roman Egypt,” we created a data management guide (including steps for data entry and upload) in order to make sure everyone was saving their images and analytical data in the same locations and using the same conventions. But we wrote the plan after we started our technical survey—if we were to do this again, we would have had this in place from the beginning.
Where to Put Your Data
We track microscopy, imaging, and XRF data in Excel. For each technique, the final step of our workflows—following acquisition and interpretation—is to add the results to our shared spreadsheet. At this point, we also add the information to the object’s database entry in the museum’s online collections database.
We save image files in one location on our department’s shared network drive and analytical results in another location. We debated whether to save everything in one location but decided to keep image data where we save our artifact documentation data. Other project data lived in a folder dedicated to the NEH grant.
Project Scale
Our artifact list was roughly 200 objects, which made it possible to use Excel to track data and to eventually visualize and understand trends. For larger-scale projects or datasets, or if you expect your small project to grow over time, consider software that will assist with project management and data—such as Digital Asset Management software (DAMS).