Welcome to the UKRDS
Welcome to the home of the UK Research Data Service (UKRDS) .
UKRDS is a joint project between RLUK (a consortium of research libraries in the UK and Ireland), and RUGIT (the Russell Group IT Directors Group).
It is funded by HEFCE (the Higher Education Funding Council for England) under its Shared Services programme, with support from JISC (the Joint Information Systems Committee).
The Project started with the objective of assessing the feasibility and costs of developing and maintaining a national shared digital research data service for UK Higher Education sector. Such a research data service is seen by the project sponsors as forming a crucial component of the UK's e-infrastructure for research and innovation, and one which will add significantly to the UK's global competitiveness.
The feasibility study concluded that embedding the skills, capability and organisation into the HEI research management process was the best approach and that a relatively small national service structure would be needed to foster this through channelling training, tools and good practice developed by existing national and international skill centres.
An interim planning phase of the project was funded to design and develop the service structure and to plan a Pathfinder implementation with the four Case Study HEIs at Bristol, Leeds, Leicester and Oxford.
This phase is now approaching completion and will deliver a report in June 2010. The report will detail the planning and costing model developed to aid HEI's in the process of embedding skills and capability. It will also recommend a development of the successful Digital Curation Centre (DCC) to provide the national co-ordination.