Resources for Research Technicians and Research Technical Professionals

A quick guide to what the Physical Sciences Data Infrastructure (PSDI) provides for Research Technical Professionals and related roles.

• Guidance for Research Technical Professionals
• Physical sciences data
• Services and tools
• Training for research-technical-professionals

Guidance for Research Technical Professionals

Research Data Management

Get help organising your data with our guidance on Research Data Management:

• Learn about the benefits of Data Management Planning
• See an example of a Data Management Plan tailored to the Physical Sciences
• Find out who can help with managing your data

Sharing Data and FAIR

Prepare for sharing your data and making it reusable with our guidance on Sharing Data and FAIR:

• Learn why sharing your data is important
• What are FAIR data?
• Learn how to Make your data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable
• Understand why you need Licenses for your data
• How to Create a Data Package for sharing your data
• Choosing a repository for your data

Electronic Research Notebooks

Get advice on considerations and requirements for choosing and implementing Digital Notebooks and Electronic Laboratory Notebooks:

• Learn about the Types of Digital Notebook
• Find out about the Benefits of Digital Notebooks
• Understand the considerations for Adopting Digital Notebooks
• How to Choose an Electronic Laboratory Notebook
• Use ELNFinder to help you choose the best Electronic Laboratory Notebook for your researchers
• Steps to Deploy an Electronic Laboratory Notebook
• Read about some Examples of Electronic Laboratory Notebooks

Metadata

Get an introduction to Metadata and learn how it is used to organise the resources within PSDI:

• An Introduction to Metadata in the Physical Sciences
• Information about PSDI metadata

Using PSDI resources

Discover the resources we provide with this Introduction to PSDI Resources and more about specific resources here:

• Learn how to find data with the PSDI Cross Data Search
• Find out how you can convert data between different file types and assess conversion quality using the PSDI Data Conversion Service
• Information about specific data sources:
  • Chemical Availability Search (ChASe)
  • Propersea - Property Prediction

Case Studies

Learn how to implement a new tool or overcome a data-related challenge with the PSDI Case Studies:

• Access data and code, and learn about our experiences reconstructing legacy databases of data from our Resurrecting Second Harmonic Generation (SHG) Data Case Study
• Find out how we transformed data trapped in PDF supplementary information into useful machine-readable data with our Electronic Supplementary Information Case Study

Training for Research Technical Professionals

PSDI provides both in-person and online training for researchers:

In-person training

You can find details of upcoming in-person training courses and community workshops from the Events page on our website.

Online training

PSDI provides a range of online training resources including:

• Self-paced learning including our Skills4Scientists courses that include courses in computing, research skills, and data management and curation.
• Tutorials

Webinars

PSDI runs regular Webinars. You can join upcoming Webinars from the Events page on our website or view Recorded Webinars on our YouTube channel.

Physical sciences data

PSDI provides access to a variety of data sources:

• Search for physical sciences data using our PSDI Cross Data Search Service where you can:

  • Search for a Substance
  • Search for a Publication References
  • Search Chemical Availability
  • Perform an Advanced Search

• View our Community Data Collections:

  • Biomolecular Simulations
  • Data to Knowledge (materials and molecular simulations using machine learning techniques)

• View our useful Data Collections for Chemical Modelling:

  • Critical Micelle Concentration (CMC)
  • Physical Chemistry Properties Data Collection

• See example Galaxy XAFS RO-Crate Workflows

• Explore the full list of PSDI Data Sources.

Services and Tools

• PSDI Data Conversion Service makes it easy to convert between different scientific file formats.
• PSDI PSDI Data Revival Service is an AI-driven service to convert your handwritten lab book pages into machine-readable data.
• Catalysis Data Infrastructure (CDI) Thematic Portal and Bibliographic Data Web Service provides services and tools to showcase how thematic portals can be used summarise scientific research data and highlight key research trends.
• Collaborative Computational Project for NMR Crystallography (CCP-NC) provides a search a crystal structure and NMR tensor visualisation tool for the MAGRES database of computational results for solid-state NMR Crystallography.
• Galaxy Workflow Management System Materials Galaxy provides access to tools for tackling computational challenges in muon spectroscopy and X-ray absorption spectroscopy.
• Container Image Registry provides curated environments for reproducible data processing and analysis.

For more information about the services and tools provided by PSDI, see Introduction to PSDI Resources.

Many of our resources are open source. You can see our repositories on GitHub.

Get involved

PSDI actively seeks the involvement of the Physical Science research community to both contribute to PSDI and to drive our future direction. There are many ways to get involved:

• Join an event
• Read our latest news
• Sign up to our newsletter on Jiscmail
• Follow us on our social media channels: LinkedIn, Mastodon, X and Bluesky.
• Do you have a data collection, service, tool, guidance collection, training, or case study you'd like to share? Use our Contact form to let us know and how we can help!

What to do next

• Visit our website
• Explore our resources on the What We Provide page
• Search for data

Related links

Take a look at the following organisations and communities committed to empowering technical professionals through recognition, career development, and opportunities:

• Technician Commitment
• The UK Institute for Technical Skills and Strategy
• Strategic TEchnical Platform for University technical Professionals (STEP-UP)

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About this page

• Creator: Cerys Willoughby
• Last modified date: 2025-07-31
• Citation: Please cite: Cerys Willoughby, _Resources for Research Technicians and Research Technical Professionals _, https://guidance.psdi.ac.uk/docusaurus-pages/docs/intro/technical, PSDI (modified 2025-07-31)
• License: CC-BY-4.0

If you would like to contribute content to the PSDI Knowledge Base or have feedback you would like to give on this guidance, please contact us.