Love Your Data week (#LYD16) continues today with tips on organizing and naming research files. Have you ever been sent a package of research files, opened them, and stared blankly at the file names and folder structure without knowing where to start to understand the contents? How often were those research files in fact your own, saved on a hard drive three or four years ago and not touched since?

Documentation, systematic file naming, and good computer file management are all essential to avoid this problem. Follow along at #LYD16 on Twitter for reminders about best practices in selecting file names and recommendations for software to document files. You can also check out the Research Data Management library guide section on file names at guides.nyu.edu/data_management/file_org.