Newsletter archive: Issue 10, May 2016

Publishing your data couldn’t be easier

If it’s on your list of things to do and you have always felt you don’t have the time, don’t worry the steps are really simple! All you need is the following:

1. A data source that is UNIQUIP Data Publishing Specification compliant. This can be a simple Excel spreadsheet, either as an output of your asset system (or similar e.g. CRIS) or manually completed, e.g. our template http://equipment.data.ac.uk/uniquip
2. An Organisation Profile Document (OPD) hosted anywhere on your website, or even on Google Docs!
3. A simple link in your institutions home page header telling the equipment.data autodiscovery programme where your OPD is published. http://opd.data.ac.uk/docs/auto

Yes it really is this easy. All you need to worry about is the quality of the data you publish.

If you would like to know more our guides describe these three easy steps to publishing your data along with explaining the role of the OPD in making your data auto-discoverable. Not only will these guides help you with publishing your research equipment availability, they will also make data describing the wider activity of your institution accessible to new search engines and data services – including the NCUB ‘Intelligent Brokerage Tool’, Konfer, and support the Jisc Research Data Discovery Service (RDDS) currently under development.