The British Oceanographic Data Centre (BODC) is a United Kingdom national facility designed to hold, manage and distribute data concerning the marine environment. Data holdings include biological, chemical, physical and geophysical data, containing measurements of nearly 22,000 different variables.

Christine Borgman, of the UCLA Department of Information Studies, has written an interesting in-depth discussion paper on "the conundrum of sharing research data":

Any librarians scratching their heads about their role in the data management universe should watch Clifford Lynch talking about it. This is one of several interviews from the November 2011 Charleston Conference.

Despite the inevitable funding cuts that austerity budgets bring, it's really not a bad time to be a UK researcher - lots of organisations want to help you manage and share your data.

Big Data Week 2012 (April 23-27) is a gathering across the globe, spaning 3 countries - US, UK and Australia. BDW offers a series of interconnected activities and conversations around the world amongst four core communities:

Jonathan Breezie, of Symplectic UK, uses prezi to introduce the subject of research data management.

BCO-DMO - the Biological and Chemical Oceanography Data Management Office - manages and serves oceanographic data and related documentation, and provides researchers and others with the tools and systems necessary to work with marine ecosystem data.

If this sounds like a recipe for data management chaos:

"I will store all data on at least one, and possibly up to 50, hard drives in my lab. The directory structure will be custom, not self-explanatory, and in no way documented or described. Students working with the data will be encouraged to make their own copies and modify them as they please, in order to ensure that no one can ever figure out what the actual real raw data is. Backups will rarely, if ever, be done."

that's the point.

The University of Cambridge Library has developed some well-organised pages called Support for Managing Research Data.

The information is organised into four sections: