The second major skills gap relates to the data management and data handling. We are at the beginning of a major reconceptualization in the curation and the ‘processing’ of these types of data source for reuse. There has been little work in the academic sector about maximising the reuse value of these types of data. The Digital Preservation Coalition in the UK, with the help of the UK Data Service has just published two comprehensive ‘white papers’ on the preservation and curation australia rcs data of social media and transactional data;[1] the UK Data Service’s Big Data Network Support team are grappling with training resources for researchers around the use of big data.
The third and fourth skills gaps surround the ethical and legal issues around these data. Ethicists are only just becoming aware of the complex issues, some of which are potentially unresolvable within existing privacy paradigms) issues. the use of these data can be mitigated by training researchers in best practices in handling and using these types of data. There are ethical and ‘secure’ training courses in the handing and analysis of personal data, and in the UK these are increasingly being harmonised across multiple Research Data Centres , e.g., the Office for National Statistics’ VML, Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs’ Data Lab, the Administrative Data Research Network and the UK Data Service’s Secure Lab. Further work is required on re-examining ethical and legal frameworks for the reuse of these types of data which are based on personal information.