January 2022 Newsletter

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James and Gavin from the Research Software Group promoting Baskerville at CIUK in December. Image courtesy of STFC / CIUK.

Welcome to the BEAR Newsletter, bringing you the latest news from the BEAR team (Birmingham Environment for Academic Research), as well as other relevant computing and data-related news from both within the University of Birmingham and outside.

Happy New Year! We hope you all managed to have a good break over Christmas. This month we are pleased to welcome James Allsopp as a Senior Research Software Engineer to the BEAR team and in computing news, all files in the old backup tape library have now been copied across to the new backup system. With nearly 4PB of research data (that’s equivalent to 44,000 4K Ultra-HD movies), it took almost 3 months for the data to be transferred across! 

In this newsletter we cover:

  • BEAR DataShare Retirement
  • Coding Club Sessions
  • Survey on Data Sharing
  • Virtual BEAR Drop-in Sessions 

BEAR DataShare Retirement

This is the last week that users will be able to access data via the web login page of BEAR DataShare, with the service retiring on Friday 21st January. Any data synced to your computer via the BEAR DataShare Client should remain but changes made will no longer be synced with anyone that you shared the files with. Further information on the retirement is available in our blog post here and you can come along to one of our drop-in sessions (listed below) for advice on where to migrate data to. Find information on the data retention policy for BEAR DataShare after the retirement here. 

Coding Club Sessions

We are pleased to see so much interest in the new Coding Club we are launching on Monday the 24th January at 1pm (via Zoom). The first session will cover the benefits of coding and toolboxes needed, with a second session now scheduled for the 15th February at 12pm focussing on Python (in-person & via Zoom). For details on the sessions and how to sign up for the Coding Club mailing list, see our blog post: https://blog.bham.ac.uk/bear/2021/12/16/coding-club/

Survey on Data Sharing

The University of Nottingham are currently carrying out research into what researchers think about requirements and mandates around data sharing. No matter your position on data sharing - positive, negative, or somewhere in between, they are keen to hear your thoughts. Results of the research will help Universities provide more tailored training and ensure they represent your views in discussions with funders and publishers around sharing data. The survey should take approximately 5 minutes: survey link is here.

Virtual BEAR Drop-in Sessions 

We are running our virtual drop-in sessions via Zoom as it allows us to create breakout rooms to discuss particular questions face-to-face. You can use these sessions to find out more about BEAR in general and the advanced research computing facilities we provide or we can answer specific questions e.g. running jobs on BlueBEAR, using the BlueBEAR portal or where to store your research data.

Current dates are listed here and below:

  • Thursday 27th January 10:00-11:00
  • Monday 31st January 13:30-14:30
  • Tuesday 8th February 11:00-12:00
  • Friday 18th February 10:00-11:00 

To join the drop-in sessions, email bearinfo@contacts.bham.ac.uk and we will send you the Zoom link and instructions on joining. Please let us know the topic of your query, so we can find the most suitable BEAR team member to speak to you.

Missed last month's newsletter?

Find December's newsletter here.

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