ABOUT THIS HANDBOOK
Welcome. This is the Data Stewardship Handbook – a community-built field handbook from the ELIXIR Research Data Management Community. It exists for one reason: data stewardship is a job people do, not just a methodology, and the people side of it is rarely written down.
If you’ve ever sat in front of a researcher’s spreadsheet at 4pm on a Friday and thought “someone, somewhere, must have done this before” – they have. This handbook tries to bring those somewheres together.
Why a handbook?
Most existing resources tell researchers how to manage their data. This one is different – it’s for the people who help researchers do that. In many institutions the data steward role is new, often a one-person operation, and the practical knowledge lives only in heads. The community asked for a place to share it. Here we are.
You’ll find:
- Real-world examples of how other data stewards run their daily operations
- Tips and pitfalls – what worked, what didn’t, what they wish they’d known
- Patterns for community-building, training, and stakeholder management
- Maturity indicators for benchmarking your own institution
This is a handbook, not a textbook. Read what you need; come back when you need more.
Who it’s for
Data stewards, at any level – from your first month to your tenth year. It’s also for anyone who does the work without the title: data managers, research librarians, RDM officers, lab data champions, PhD students doing IT support for their group. If you’ve ever helped someone figure out where to put their data, this is for you.
Meet the magpie
You’ll see this little bird around. They’re the handbook’s guide – a magpie, the steward’s spirit animal.
Magpies are observant, curious, and notorious collectors – they pick up the things that catch their eye, sort them, remember where they put them, and bring back the ones that are useful. That’s the same instinct that makes a good data steward. So the magpie shows up across the handbook to share things they’ve noticed:
- Through callouts in the body of pages, where they offer tips, asides and the occasional “watch out for that one”
- In your personal nest – a save-for-later space (find it via the bird at the bottom of any sidebar)
- At the bottom of every section’s sidebar, hanging around like a guide who’s seen the trail before
How to use the trail
The handbook is organised around three landmarks. You don’t have to read them in order – pick the door that matches what you came for.
🪶 Signposts – practical guidance
Step-by-step advice for the things data stewards actually do: writing an RDM strategy, building support networks, communicating about RDM, navigating data-protection requirements. Most useful when you’re new, or when you’re starting something for the first time.
🪶 Campfires – case studies
Real institutional stories from data stewards across ELIXIR. “Here’s what we did, here’s what worked, here’s what we’d do differently.” Most useful when you’ve got the basics and want to see how others have solved a particular puzzle.
🪶 Waypoints – maturity indicators
A self-assessment framework for benchmarking your institution’s data stewardship maturity. Most useful when you need to make the case for resources, or when you’re planning where to invest next.
What we don’t do
We try to stay in our lane. The handbook is not:
- Legal advice. Anything we say about compliance is generic – check it against your institution, ELIXIR node, and country before you act on it.
- For researchers. If your question is “how should I manage my own research data?”, you want RDMkit instead.
- A registry of tools, training, or standards. Those live in TeSS, FAIRsharing, FAIR Cookbook, and DSW. We point at them when relevant; we don’t replace them.
How it’s made
The handbook is built openly on GitHub by a group of data stewards (and a few designers and developers) volunteering their time. Every page lists its contributors. Want to add yours? Have a look at how to contribute.
Visual refinement and theme customisation were iterated on in collaboration with Claude Code (Anthropic’s CLI for Claude), under human direction.
Licence and citation
Content is published under a CC-BY 4.0 licence – reuse it, remix it, share it, just credit us. The site is built on the ELIXIR Toolkit Theme (MIT licence).
To cite the handbook:
Data Stewardship Handbook. A deliverable from the ELIXIR-funded DATAREX implementation study. URL: https://elixir-europe.org/internal-projects/commissioned-services/datarex
You’ll also find a per-page citation block at the bottom of every chapter – handy when you want to point a colleague at a specific page.