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Project Naming

Project titles should be as concise as possible while still containing key information about the dataset. The title is often the most important piece of metadata describing a resource. It is the first thing seen by people when browsing or searching for a resource, and may be the only information used to evaluate the content of the resource.

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• Location

• Data type

• Year (or other time unit) range

• Program or institution name, if your dataset is part of a large effort

Naming Examples

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Poor project titles:

• Plankton data

• ROV data from SueData Management

• Workshop for Mike

Better project titles:

• Plankton Diversity Data , Prince William Sound, 2012-2016Management Workshop, University of Wyoming ARCC, Fall 2024

• Conductivity, temperature and depth data for 12 northwestern Gulf of Mexico locations, May to July 2012

• SAFARI 2000 Upper Water Column Profiles, Gulf of Alaska, 2011-2012

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Project Naming on ARCC Systems

While the project names above are very descriptive and something to record in a README file, ARCC systems have restrictions on how the type of characters and how many can be used in a project name. This is due to how permissions work on the system and very long project names with spaces or other special characters can cause problems with the administration of the system.

The recommended limitation for project names on ARCC are to use acronyms when possible or shorten words in a logical way. The restrictions are as follows:

• Lowercase letters and numbers only

• Hyphens are allowed, but no other special characters such as underscores

• No longer than sixteen (16) characters

For Example, if this tutorial were to be a project on ARCC systems, we would take the long title of “Data Management Workshop, University of Wyoming ARCC, Fall 2024” and change it to read as one of these suggestions:

• data-mgmt-arcc24

• arcc-datmgt-uw24

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Organizing Folders within a Project

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Folders are an important way to organize your project files into smaller, easier-to-manage, and identifiable units. Create a logical folder structure to help you stay organized and easily find and retrieve your stored files, and initiate it at the beginning of your project to save time and frustration.

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Avoid complex, deeply-hierarchical folder structures, which require extra browsing for file storage and retrieval. Try to keep the folder levels to no more than three deep. Folder structures can be simplified by including all the essential information concisely in the file name.

Note
With the above stated, there are situations where the technical issues can arise if there are too many files within a single directory. Hundreds of files in a directory is usually fine, multiple thousands of files in a directory could become problematic.

The following best practices are recommended for creating an effective project folder structure:

• Organize folders by major project components.

• Create a hierarchical system with nested subfolders (high-level folders for broad topics with more specific folders within). Examples of high-level folder topics include:

  • Images

  • Data files

  • Project admin documents

  • PDFs of related literatureInput data files by discreet location/source/type

  • Metadata

  • Code or scripts

  • Results or output data

• Organize the data by data type and then by research activity.

• Separate preliminary and final data into different folder structures.

• Be consistent with your folder organization throughout the life of your project and/or Research Campaign.

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Folder Organization Example

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On ARCC systems, folder/directory names do not have to comply with the project name restrictions, but it helpful to keep them as short as possible while being descriptive, without using too many special characters and no spaces.

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Level of Granularity

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It may be unrealistic to anticipate and pre-create every folder that will be needed for a project. Instead, consider the level of folder hierarchy that will provide sufficient structure for users and collaborators on your project to create their own subfolders.

A good approach is to establish the first one or two levels in the hierarchy, then let your collaborators create subfolders for lower levels as needed.

Granularity Examples

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• Project: Sea Monkey Forage Studydata-mgmt-arcc24

  • Parent folder: Prey DataResearchData_Location1_05012024

    • Child folder: 2017images

      • Users can create subfolders within as needed

    • Child folder: 2018samples

      • Users can create subfolders within as needed

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• Rename default folder names generated by the Research Workspace with descriptive titles.

• Name folders according to the areas of work to which they relate, and not after individuals. Classify file types with broad folder names.

• Use folder names that are unambiguous and meaningfully describe the folder contents to you and your collaborators.

• Be consistent when developing a naming scheme. Ideally, a scheme is created at the start of a project and used consistently throughout.

• Avoid extra long folder names, but use information-rich file names instead (refer to File Naming).

• Try to avoid duplicate folder names or paths. For example, if a folder is named “Photos” in one directory, don’t create a subfolders elsewhere named “Images”.

Examples of folder names

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Poor folder names:

• My DataMy Folder

• Data From Ben

Better folder names:

• Processed herring acoustic summaries, 2012-2016

• Raw herring acoustic data, 2012GPS-locations-sagebrush-study-2021

• Raw-songbird-acoustic-data2012-2016

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Next Steps