 Welcome to the Data Management video series. I'm Kristen Briny, the data services librarian here at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. In this video, we're going to do something a little different than some of the other videos in this series because those videos are really focused on how to improve your data management. But in this video, I want to go through reasons you should do data management in the first place besides the fact that you might be required to do it by your funder. So let's look at a top five reasons you should manage your data better. Reason number one to manage your data better is to protect your data from loss. Good data management means that if the building burns down, if your hard drive crashes, if your laptop gets stolen, you still have your data and it's in a form that you can easily pick back up and use it and really not have a slowdown in your research. The second reason to do data management is so you can find your data when you need it. This can be data from last week. This can be data from last year. But if your data is well organized, if it's well named, you can just sort through everything and find what you need very quickly instead of spending a lot of time digging for the right data set. The third reason to do data management is because of data security. A well managed set means that that data set will not be disclosed prematurely or disclosed at all depending on what you need. So if you have human subject information, if you are creating data that will lead to a patent, you want to manage that data well so other people can't access it. The fourth reason to manage your data is so you can reuse your old data. This can be really difficult to actually pick up and use old data because you need to be able to find it, you need to actually be able to read the files and open them in some software program, you need to be able to find the notes and pick up and understand what you did. So well managed data means everything is in order, you have it, you can open it, you can read it and understand it when you need it, even if that data is from five years ago. The final reason to do data management is because a lot of people are sharing their data and I firmly believe that well managed data is data that is easier to share and this can be sharing with a co-worker or sharing with somebody who's picking up on your project that you leave a group or sharing with the public as you're now required to do with a lot of research funded projects. So managed data well means that you can put it in a form that others will easily understand and will make sharing much easier. So those are some top five reasons to manage your data better. Those are not by far the only reasons to manage your data but the whole point of doing data management is to make it easier to use and reuse and find your data when you need it and the whole idea is that research can be difficult and you don't want to be fighting against your data on top of doing research. So manage your data well, take care of your data and your research will be a little easier.