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This repository contains the tools necessary to create three different data management documents; a Data Management Implementation Plan, an Internal Sharing Template, and a Documentation File. We also provide the tools to turn any of these documents into a webpage for your project using Github Pages. We have created template and example documents for each document. as a lot of this walkthrough is designed to help set up a Github Pages webpage. The following steps contain links and instructions to help you through this process. After completing these steps you will have a data management plan and a working webpage for specific to your research project. If you are only interested in creating the actual data manangment documents and don’t want to make a Github Webpage then skip to this step. This document will help you:
Github is a website with variety of uses including sharing data and creating collaborative projects. For this project we are using Github to host our document files. This service is free and allows you to share documents with anyone. You don’t need an account to access these files but you will need a Github account if you want to use Github to publish your own documents. You can create one here.
There are two types of repositories on GitHub; public ones and private ones. Public repositories can be seen and downloaded by anyone on the web but only edited by collaborators. Private repositories can only be seen by its contributors. Normally Github charges for private repositories but researchers and students can apply for a free private account by following these steps.
Github Pages allows you to create webpages from files hosted on your Github account. This allows you to publish documents through GitHub that anyone can access through a web browser.
GitHub Pages are ALWAYS PUBLIC REGARDLESS OF THE PRIVACY OF THE REPOSITORY. This combined with the fact that ALL FILES TYPES in a GitHub Pages enabled location are viewable means you must be certain you are not publishing private information before enabling GitHub Pages. You can decide which repositories in your account to publish using Github Pages with one exception; your USERNAME.github.io repository (which must be created for Github Pages to work with any of your repositories) will always be navigable and thus public. There is some customization which allows you to only publish a certain branch or folder in your repository instead of the whole thing but this only really relevant if you have a private repository.
Setting up Github Pages is fairly simple and straight forward.
Next you will probaly want to enable Github Pages on another repositories such as the one that will host your various data management documents.
One way to get the template files is to download the entire repository. To do this:
If would like to select the files you download individually follow these steps:
After downloading the file to your computer you still need to to upload that file into your repository. Follow the intructions from Github if you need help uploading a file Add a file to a Repo.
After you have the template you want (Implementation, [Internal Sharing] (https://github.com/landonma/Data-Management-Templates-Project/tree/master/Internal_Sharing_Template), or Documentaion) in the format you desire you are ready to edit the file for your project. If you want to publish on GitHub Pages you should use the markdown file. Otherwise you can choose between the markdown, word file, or LaTeX formats (found [here] (datastorage-norm-edited)) is meant to be edited and filled out directly. As you look through the template file you should fill in any _____ spaces and change any of the boiler-plate text with details specific for your project.
The example documents are meant to help you think about the important parts of each section and are not meant to be edited and published. These document will help illustrate what a finished version for each document type will look like.
Markdown was created to be easy to read and edit and we use this format for all the pages in this repository. Markdown files(.md) have some of the structural functionality of LaTeX or HTML while still remaining easily readable. Through Jekyll you can publish your markdown files as webpages on Github. The coding involved with formatting a Markdown document is easy to learn and you can find a guide for using markdown here. Some additional tips for creating markdown documents:
It is easiest to edit markdown files either by editing the documents through Github in a web browser or by using a source code/text editor (Atom was created by GitHub and is a great tool for editing/previewing markdown). You can use any text editor such as Microsoft Word or Google Docs but if you are unfamiliar with editing code I strongly recommend using editing the documents on Github itself. To edit them using Github simply navigate to your repository, click on the file you want to edit and click the edit (pencil) button on the top right of the page.
When you use Github Pages, your repository is your webserver. Therefor, the file titled “index” will be the homepage of your website. If the only page you want is a completed document plan you can rename that document “index.md”. Now whenever you navigate to your repository URL you will get document. Otherwise, you may want a list of links with some basic text for the home page. To do this, use this markdown file as a template and edit the text and links as necessary. There are three types of links used in this repository and they all have slightly different text inside the parentheses “ () “. To best distinguish between these types it is best to look at the code in an editor.
Some of them are basic hyper links which contain the full url of the page in the () which is linked to ie. google.com.
Others are relative links which match a file name in your repository. To create this type of link include the full file name exactly as it appears in the repositry including the extension. Data Management Implementation Plan Template. Relative links work well if you want to keep the user experience consistent as clicking on them from the .io webpage will not take you to the .github page and vise versa.
There are also “links” which jump to header within the same page. These are useful when creating a table of contents and look like this. They are created by putting one “#” then the name of the header you wan to jump. The header name must be typed in all lower case even if the actually header isn’t and the spaces are replaces with dashes -. Make sure to change these links whenever a header name is changed. Also note that there should only be ONE # regardless of the header level.
Github has also created a number of themes that change the appearance of your pages and can be viewed here. Instructions on how to apply the themes are here. This repository has no theme applied to it but you are welcome to try them out.
You can also use HTML to create/format any pages on your repository. For simplicity and to show what Markdown can do; spliced in HTML was used sparingly.