SAL staff are here to facilitate and support the use of specialist spatial software and data within the TOL. To enable us to do this, please allow sufficient time for the proper processes to be undertaken when requesting new software or data be acquired to support your research.

Key UOW Policies and Guidelines that affect the Spatial Analysis Laboratories include:

1. The Delegated Authority Policy

Spatial Data Licences are covered in the UOW Delegated Authority Policy under clause 37.03: CONTRACT & AGREEMENT DELEGATIONS:

If you are provided with a spatial data licence by a research collaborator, SAL can help you get that licence to one of the people at UOW who hold an appropriate delegation.

The Data Access Agreements (DAAs) that you will be asked to sign when you receive spatial data through SAL are the legal documents that connect you as the user of the data to the supplier of the data ‘through’ UOW. These agreements will include any special conditions required by the supplier in their licence so that you know exactly what you can (and can’t!) do with the data they have provided into your research project.

2. The Research Data Management Policy

The Research Data Management Policy works with the Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research (2007). A new Code was released by the NHMRC on June 14th 2018, replacing the 2007 one and should be read alongside the Guide to Managing and Investigating Potential Breaches of the Code, 2018 (the Investigation Guide).

There are lots of reasons to manage your research data. As researchers who often depend on the spatial data of others to do our work and who spend a lot of time and effort doing creating our own, it makes sense that the spatial data produced by our research should be curated and archived at the end of our projects.

SAL staff can help with tools, tips and techniques for during and after the project if you need them. We are also available at the end of the project to receive the final data package (with metadata!) and to archive your data according to your project’s requirements.

3. The IT Acceptable Use Policy

There are many sections of this policy that it is important to be familiar with and understand, here we are going to focus on those around data management though.

The emphasis added here for the purposes of this discussion:

1. Section 4.25 ‘Personally Owned Devices’ Sub-Section 1.2 states that “Users must not connect a personally owned device to a wired network port without authorisation.”
2. Section 4.25 ‘Personally Owned Devices’ Sub-Section 1.6 states that “Users must not store confidential or valuable University data on a personally owned device.”
3. Section 4.27 states that “Users must not store or backup confidential or valuable University data with externally hosted services other than where provided through and approved by IMTS.”
4. Section 4.43 states that “Confidential data must not be stored on external or portable drives.”
5. Section 4.44 states that “Confidential or valuable University data must not be stored on personally owned devices.”
6. Section 4.49 states that “All valuable University data must be primarily stored (or have a current copy stored) on enterprise storage provided through IMTS.”

To support good data management, a dedicated research project share space is available once your research project has been registered with SAL. You also have access to the OneDrive storage space that is available while you have a current UOW user account.

It is really important to remember that your OneDrive storage is only available while you are a UOW member (staff or student) though – if you do not make arrangements to archive the files stored in your UOWmail OneDrive storage before your account expires, these files will be lost forever. Hence, section 4.49 of the IT Acceptable Use Policy 😀

If you have questions about spatial data management, remember you can ask about this at any meeting you have with one of the SAL Technical Support Staff!

The final thing to remember is there are Software Asset Management Guidelines that are also maintained by IMTS.  Key areas of this guideline can affect whether, and how quickly, the software can be deployed for you onto a computer managed by SAL. As with spatial data requests, you need to allow us time to process any requests you may have. Ideally, we would love to be able to say “YES!”. Some of the things that need to be taken into consideration before installing a new software package are covered in these guidelines, and then we also need to consider the technical and practical requirements of the TOL environment and the other current users of the space – this means that you may not be able to get a response as quickly as you would expect from your experiences of installing software at home…