Finding‌ ‌a‌ ‌way‌ ‌out‌ ‌of‌ ‌data‌ ‌horrors:‌ ‌designing‌ ‌a‌ ‌Halloween‌ ‌themed‌ ‌Escape‌ ‌Room‌

A poster presented during Research Data Alliance (RDA)16th Plenary Meeting - Costa Rica (Virtual).

Our new digital escape room makes use of gamification to introduce some basic data management concepts and offers a fun way to educate and to prompt discussions with researchers.

Read more in this blog post.

Research data management (RDM) as a service offered by university libraries is new for researchers as well as support staff. The RDM teams often struggle with reaching new users. In order to improve the visibility of our service, RDM colleagues from various Dutch universities joined forces to organize an awareness campaign around Halloween. One thing that we often notice is that the value of good RDM is often learned the hard way: that is, when things go wrong. To be able to talk about failure in a playful and safe way we chose to conduct "the Data Horror Week", also as a sort of counterpart to the popular “data love” events around St Valentines.

The poster highlights the main element of our campaign: the Data Horror Escape Room.

Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, we had to plan for online events only. One online activity that has recently become popular is the digital escape room. An escape room is a game where a team of players has to solve a set of puzzles to “escape” a room in which they are “locked” or to defeat a villain. There is usually a theme and a story that brings the puzzles together. Digital escape rooms, as well as “in-person” escape rooms, are often used in educational settings. This format could offer a fun way to learn about research data management.

The room we created consists of six tasks related to the following data management topics: FAIR data, personal data, data archiving, data transfer, persistent identifiers, and metadata. As the room was to become part of the Data Horror Week around Halloween, a theme with ghosts and vampires was chosen.