Once upon a time some colleagues and I acted out the story of Little Red Riding Hood to demonstrate how essential metadata are: had the wolf read the small print on the bottle the little girl was carrying in her basket, he would not have died. Now I’m not saying that dead wolves in fairy tales are a bad thing; I’m only surprised to see how many academic messages are being dressed up as classic characters. Even when I ignore intended puns which link FAIR data and fairy tales.
Recently we saw Cinderella’s stick: A Fairy Tale for Digital Preservation, in which a young researcher leaves her USB stick in someone else’s computer. Will the content of the stick reveal its owner, so that the stick – like Cinderella’s glass slipper – can be returned to her? During this quest the reader will learn about digital preservation, which is “the endeavor to protect digital material against loss, corruption, hardware/software technology changes, and changes in the knowledge of the community” (promo).
Good old Holmes and Watson try to solve the case of the baffling funder mandate, where Holmes unravels the “complex and sometimes inscrutable” restrictions placed by cOAlition S on where researchers can publish their articles. Rather out of character the detective concludes there’s little he can do to help in this case.
And the Dutch novel Nooit meer slapen (Beyond sleep) sets the scene for a blog series about research data management. Protagonist Alfred clearly hadn’t written a data management plan, when he finds himself in Norway, expecting to do fieldwork but being badly prepared for it, and constantly feeling himself at a disadvantage against his colleagues. Blog author Mareike Boom has done a great job in advising us how we should deal with research data, by drawing lessons from fiction.
