01 February 2012

Fileplan for the shared drive

The action taking phase of the DATUM in Action project includes the EU project staff implementing the DMP using in-house software and shared drives. The EU project staff have requested help in organising files on the MATSIQEL shared drive. We have drawn up a fileplan, based on previous experiences, and this has been set up and is currently being populated by EU project staff with existing and new files. In that process the fileplan may need some amendment. The outline fileplan is given below and a more detailed version is available on the Project website.

ProjectDevelopment
ProjectManagement
  • Administration
  • Agreements
  • Dissemination
  • Finance
  • FunderCommunication
  • Meetings
  • Personnel
  • Planning
  • Reporting
WorkPackage[name/number]           
  • Dissemination
  • Ethics+Governance
  • ProjectManagement
    • Administration
    • Meetings
    • Finance
    • Planning
    • Reporting
  • ResearchLiteratureReview
  • Research[name of activity]
    • Administration
    • Data
    • DataAnalysis
    • LiteratureReview
    • Outputs
    • Tools
The complexity in the above fileplan comes from the complexity of the MATSIQEL project. This comprise several Work Packages each with their own leaders and researchers, and under each Work Package be a number of different research activities undertaken. This causes the repetition of folders such as ProjectManagement or Finance that would contain files applicable either to the whole project or only to the specific Work Package. As the fileplan is populated decisions will be made about the appropriate level for files and whether this repetition is necessary.

A simplified version of the fileplan for a simpler project might comprise:

ProjectDevelopment
ProjectManagement
  • Administration
  • Agreements
  • Dissemination
  • Ethics+Governance
  • Finance
  • FunderCommunication
  • Meetings
  • Personnel
  • Planning
  • Reporting
  • ResearchLiteratureReview
  • Research[name of activity]
    • Administration
    • Data
    • DataAnalysis
    • Outputs
    • Tools
The next stage is to apply access controls to the folders. Certain folders such as ProjectManagement>Personnel contain files that should only be seen by the PI. Other folders such as ProjectManagement>Dissemination contain files that need to be accessible and usable (read & write) by all members of the team.

The EU project staff also requested help with file naming and version control. Guidance on fileplans, file naming and version control is in production. This tailored guidance is drawing on, and referencing, existing published guidance.

Although a fileplan is not rocket science, it is an unfamiliar concept to many researchers. It is also not as simple to produce as you might expect as all research projects vary in their nature, size and the demands placed upon them. We have used names for the folders/sub-folders which means that folders are in A/Z rather than logical order. We felt that numbering folders to achieve logical ordering would not be acceptable to the researchers. The other problem is that of retention management. Folders are likely to contain items with different retention periods. Either we create additional sub-folders to reflect this, enabling folders to be deleted when required, or we would have to accept that everything is kept for the longest required period: deletion at the granular level of the file is too time consuming to be practical.

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