Skip to main content

Nightmare on Research Street 2019: The Sequel

Participant at the 2018 Nightmare on Research Street sharing his story

"It was 4 a.m. on the Friday of Finals Week and my paper was due in 4 hours. My parents had already moved me out of my dorm for the summer and I was working in their hotel room. I had almost completed my revision of my final paper when, suddenly, the screen went blank...I lost everything except my first page."

Hopefully, this doesn't sound familiar to you. If it does, you're among friends.

Come share harrowing tales of research loss and close calls that haunt us as we return for Nightmare on Research Street: The Sequel. Picking up where our protagonists left off in 2018, our cast of data-loss survivors and research data super sleuths will banish the specters of data-gone-wrong and discuss tactics and strategies to keep your data alive. 

Whether we use qualitative or quantitative data, paper manuscripts, physical samples, historical documents, interview recordings, cultural artifacts, specimens, or if everything you study is digital, we all want to keep our research products safe. Even here at OU Libraries, we've all had close calls that haunt us.


“A few years ago I mailed all of my physical samples to a collaborator. I made the mistake of not dividing the samples up to keep a “copy” locally in case anything happened in transit to the samples. During the few days of shipping, I was terrified that six years of fieldwork would get lost in the mail. In retrospect, it would have saved a lot of angst and trouble to divide each sample and send the remainder on once the first half made it.” - Claire Curry, Science Librarian

 “My colleague put his laptop on the roof of the car and forgot that he did so. When he drove away and checked his rear-view mirror, he got to see it spinning off the roof onto the pavement.” - Mark Laufersweiler, Research Data Specialist

Register now to hear more harrowing tales in this campfire-style discussion co-sponsored with the OU Graduate College. 

People are sitting around sharing research horror stories.