About the Data Catalogue

What is the Data Catalogue?

The Data Catalogue is a service that allows University of Liverpool Researchers to create records of information about their finalised research data, and save those data in a secure online environment.

What are the benefits of the Data Catalogue?

Increasingly funders (and in some cases publishers) require researchers to make available the research data underlying their publications and conclusions; there is also a growing movement among scientists themselves to share their data more openly for the benefit of all researchers.

The Data Catalogue provides a good means of making that data available in a structured way, in a form that can be discovered by both general search engines and academic search tools. These records also create citations that can be used by others when referring to your data in their own work, opening up the potential for extra citations.

What can I use the Data Catalogue for?

There are two types of record you can create in the Data Catalogue:

  • A discovery-only record – in these cases your research data may be held somewhere else and you want to provide a record to help people find it. In these cases you can create a record that alerts users to the existence of your data, and provide a link to where those data are held.
  • A discovery and data record – in these cases you are both creating a record to help people discover your data exist, and depositing the data themselves into the Data Catalogue. This process will create a unique Digital Object identifier (DOI) which can be used in citations to the data.

We recommend that you deposit finalised research data into the Data Catalogue only when there is no appropriate funder- or discipline-specific data service for your data – the Data Catalogue is intended to complement, not compete with, established data services.

What shouldn’t I use the Data Catalogue for?

The Data Catalogue is not for the storing of active data, i.e. data to which you are still adding, or data which has not yet been cleaned and processed. Data in such a state should be stored in the University's Active Datastore.

Further information

Some further information about the importance of the different types of information about your data that are stored in the Data Catalogue – Discovery Metadata and Re-Use Metadata – are available on the Research Data Management Website’s Making your data discoverable page.

Contact us at rdm@liverpool.ac.uk. We aim to respond within 5 working days.