There are many online and in-person courses available for librarians to learn about research data management, data analysis, and visualization, but after you have taken a course, how do you go about applying what you have learned? While it is possible to just start offering classes and consultations, your service will have a better chance of becoming relevant if you consider stakeholders and review your institutional environment. This lecture will give you some ideas to get started with data services at your institution.
6. Realistic Final Plan
1. Create a web presence.
2. Conduct an environmental scan for data and data management
resources
3. Pick the low hanging fruit - recommended by the CIO at the time -
DMPs and other funder requirements
4. Talk to researchers, students, and others involved in data at the
university.
5. Educate everyone I can.
7. "There is no need for research libraries to
start with all recommendations or to try to
deliver a full spectrum of data services at
once. Small steps will do.“
LIBER working group on E-science. Ten recommendations for libraries to
get started with research data management. 2012.
Available from: http://libereurope.eu/wp-content/uploads/The%20research%20data%20group%202012%20v7%20final.pdf
8. Assessment
Think ahead. What will you need to show to prove data support is
useful and working?
1. Articulate - What do I already know?
2. Assemble - What are the best evidence sources to answer this
question?
3. Assess - How does the evidence I have apply in my context?
4. Agree - What is the best decision based on the available evidence?
5. Adapt - What worked? What didn’t? What can be improved?
(Coates et. al. 2018)
11. How many additional partnerships, both on and off campus, result
from this work?
For more information go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_network_analysis_software
12. What do Researchers Want vs What Library Offers.
Within the realm of research data management,
libraries spend resources building and providing
tools that are not within researcher workflows
and/or are not aligned with researcher values. By
doing this, we are setting ourselves up for failure.
Daniella Louenberg, 2018
13. Throughout these discussions, my focus remains: what
is it that investigators need to be more successful?
What is it that the university needs to provide in order
to meet its various responsibilities? What do we need
from IT, the Office of Sponsored Programs, the
Graduate School? And, yes, from the Libraries. But
looking at the issues with a focus on what the
investigators need turns out to be quite different from
focusing on “what can the library provide.”
T. Scott Plutchak, 2016
15. Interviews
Find out what people need, without jumping in with what library does.
NECDMC Simplified Data Management Plan
Types of Data
• What types of data will you be creating or capturing? (experimental measures,
observational or qualitative, model simulation, existing)
• How will you capture, create, and/or process the data? (Identify instruments, software,
imaging, etc. used)
Contextual Details (Metadata) Needed to Make Data Meaningful to Others
• What file formats and naming conventions will you be using?
Storage, Backup and Security
• Where and on what media will you store the data?
• What is your backup plan for the data?
• How will you manage data security?
17. Strategic Planning
• PEST - political, economic, social, and technological factor
• PESTEL – add environmental and legal factors
• SWOT – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats
• Six Forces Model – competition, new entrants, end users, suppliers,
substitutes, and complementary products
• SOAR – strengths, opportunities, aspirations, results
18. Partners
• Information Technology/Technology Services – backups and security
• Office of Research – grants, research output for assessment, patents
• Administration – people, financial, facilities data
• Records – patient health records
• Statistics or Biostatistics department
• Etc.
Read and take some of the practical steps listed in Humphreys, B.L. (2018)
How to earn a reputation as a great partner. Journal of the Medical Library
Association. 106(4), 521-526.
http://jmla.pitt.edu/ojs/jmla/article/view/504/695
19. Simplified Data Lifecycle
Data
Management
Plan and
Ownership
Organizing
and folder
and file
name
suggestions
Metadata
or Readme
files
Clean data
and statistics
help
IR, subject
repository,
or journal
that
includes
supporting
data.
Stable file
formats,
duration as
per funder or
other policy.
20. Data in the Context of Research Support
(Henderson et. al. 2015)
23. Journal Policies and Open Science
• Funders are only one group interested in making data available.
• Journal editors, professional groups, businesses and others are
interested in data and scholarly research.
Piwowar HA, Day RS, Fridsma DB (2007) Sharing Detailed Research Data
Is Associated with Increased Citation Rate. PLOS ONE 2(3):
e308.https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0000308 has been cited
over 300 times!
• Look for recent articles in your subject area on citation increases
when data is shared.
24. The Journal Article Exception
http://retractionwatch.com/2016/02/23/we-are-living-in-hell-authors-retract-2nd-paper-due-to-missing-raw-data/
29. Suggested Plan
• Manage Presence
• Plan Assessment
• Understand Needs
• Learn about Environment
• Plan Strategically
• Develop Partners
• Get the Big Picture
30. NLM Strategic Plan 2017-2017
As we look forward, this document positions us to address
existing and emerging challenges in biomedical research and
public health. We will achieve this by creating a vibrant
workforce; building on our core functions of acquiring,
collecting, and disseminating the world’s biomedical
literature; and extending these skills and developing new ones
to make data findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable.
NLM Director Patti Brennan discussing the NLM Strategic Plan 2017-2027: A
Platform for Biomedical Discovery and Data-Powered Health
39. References
Bidney, M. (2014). Library as Platform: Assessing Outreach and Engagement in the Library of the
Future. In Assessing Liaison Librarians: Documenting Impact for Positive Change (pp. 105–119).
Chicago: American Library Association
Coates, H. L., Carlson, J., Clement, R., Henderson, M., Johnston, L. R., & Shorish, Y. (2018). How are
we Measuring Up? Evaluating Research Data Services in Academic Libraries. Journal of Librarianship
and Scholarly Communication, 6(1), eP2226. DOI: http://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2226
Henderson, Margaret. (2016) Data Management: A Practical Guide for Librarians. Rowman &
Littlefield.
Henderson, Margaret E., Arendt, Julie, Roseberry, Martha, Cyrus, John, and Gau, Karen. (2015)
Collaborating to Improve Collaboration: Informationist Team Support for an Interdisciplinary
Research Group. Poster presented ACRL (Association of College & Research Libraries) Science &
Technology Section Annual Program; American Library Association Annual Meeting, San Francisco,
CA. http://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/libraries_present/39/
Henderson, Margaret; Raboin, Regina; Shorish, Yasmeen; and Van Tuyl, Steve. (2014) “Research
Data Management on a Shoestring Budget.” ASIS&T Bulletin, 40(6) (based on presentation at RDAP
2014 in San Diego, CA)
40. Knapp, P.B. (1959) College Teaching and the College Library. American Library Association:
Chicago.(ACRL Monograph No. 23) p. 93.
Lamar Soutter Library, University of Massachusetts Medical School. New England Collaborative Data
Management Curriculum. http://library.umassmed.edu/necdmc
LIBER working group on E-science. Ten recommendations for libraries to get started with research
data management. 2012. http://libereurope.eu/wp-
content/uploads/The%20research%20data%20group%202012%20v7%20final.pdf
Louenberg, D. (2018) We Can’t Succeed Alone. UC3 (California Digital Library blog). December 18,
2018. https://uc3.cdlib.org/2018/12/18/we-cant-succeed-alone/
Murphy, S. A., & Gibson, C. (2014). Programmatic Assessment of Research Services: Information the
Evolution of an Engaged Liaison Librarian Model. In Assessing Liaison Librarians: Documenting
Impact for Positive Change (pp. 17–33). Chicago: American Library Association.
NLM Strategic Plan 2017-2027: A Platform for Biomedical Discovery and Data-Powered
Health https://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/plan/lrp17/NLM_StrategicReport2017_2027.html
Plutchak, T. S. (2016) A Librarian Out of the Library. Journal of eScience Librarianship 5(1):
e1106. http://dx.doi.org/10.7191/jeslib.2016.1106
41. Sayre, Franklin, & Amy Riegelman. "The Reproducibility Crisis and
Academic Libraries." College & Research Libraries [Online], 79.1
(2018): 2. Web. 13 Jun. 2018
https://crl.acrl.org/index.php/crl/article/view/16846/18452
Sayre, Franklin, & Amy Riegelman. “Replicable Services for
Reproducible Research: A Model for Academic Libraries.” College &
Research Libraries [Online], preprint:
https://crl.acrl.org/index.php/crl/article/view/16993
Sayer & Riegelman MLA Webinar, Helping Science Succeed: The
Librarian’s Role in Addressing the Reproducibility Crisis
http://www.medlib-ed.org/products/1974/helping-science-succeed-
the-librarians-role-in-addressing-the-reproducibility-crisis
This is not a series of steps, but it does make sense to do some things early on. I made sure there was a web presence, a LibGuide, before going out to meet with people, so I could refer them somewhere for more information when they were finally looking for data help.
Based on EBLIP principles.
Bidney, M. (2014). Library as Platform: Assessing Outreach and Engagement in the Library of the Future. In Assessing Liaison Librarians: Documenting Impact for Positive Change (pp. 105–119). Chicago: American Library Association
Murphy, S. A., & Gibson, C. (2014). Programmatic Assessment of Research Services: Information the Evolution of an Engaged Liaison Librarian Model. In Assessing Liaison Librarians: Documenting Impact for Positive Change (pp. 17-33). Chicago: American Library Association.
For example, instead of just listing partnerships, you could do a social network analysis graph, with the direction and width of lines, or different line types, showing the interactions between partners.
I have stressed this many times, but I’m repeating it here in the words of others – what do our Data creators and users, faculty or researchers, really want?
I still find that one of the best basic starting points for learning more is the New England Collaborative Data Management Curriculum
A Joint Initiative of the University of Massachusetts Medical School
& the National Network of Libraries of Medicine, New England Region
Simplified Data Management Plan
Fit data into the spectrum of faculty and researcher support provided by your library. This diagram is based on the work I did with colleagues for an NLM Informationist Award and you can see we found many ways to work with our research group. This was before the NIH push for reproducibility (change slides)
Helping with reproducibility is another way data librarians can support research,
Riegelman
As I was looking at slide decks from past presentations to get ideas of what I have done that seems to help, I realized that the references I used just a few years ago needed to be updated. While this older article is good, it is much better that you look for something recent that is subject specific to the group you are working in. Biomedical science has very different citing patterns compared to ecology, and human subjects have different criteria for sharing that cell samples. Learn about the field you are working in.
Some researchers will be up on things like open science and data citation, but others will be happy to have your assistance in navigating all the different
…there is a widespread lack of understanding or, at least, consensus among faculty and staff about what a library can and should contribute to the college – indeed, about what a library is.
This was back in 1959 in an ACRL monograph discussing the role of librarians in college teaching, and there are still times we have to convince faculty we can teach, so data services is often going to be something we have to sell. There will be times you hit just the right person and they are thrilled to have your help. In the faculty survey I eventually did at VCU, I had respondents excited to get help, and one who stated that librarians didn’t know enough and shouldn’t help at all.
People not knowing what the library does is not new. So we need to think about marketing to make sure we get the word out there. Things can snowball. The wonderful PR person at the VCU Libraries sent around a start of the school year newsletter with information about new hires, including my data librarian position, in print, to faculty. I was contacted by a young faculty member for help with a DMP because she saw me, and as we talked, she realized there were many things I could help with, so she wanted me to speak at a faculty meeting for her department. I talked there, and that led to another faculty member using our bepress IR for his next conference. We didn’t end up being the final publisher, but he did end up getting the meeting papers published open access by negotiating with the threat of publishing in our IR instead. So that one contact, led to multiple connections.
And as much as we want to keep services free in our libraries, there is a need to know the costs of what we are doing and show that we are spending money wisely. We need to prove the worth of new services that some see as unnecessary for libraries.
Get the big picture – how does data fit into the whole research and scholarly communication life cycle.
While I wanted to mainly discuss practical things you could do to promote data librarianship at your place of work, I also want to remind you that our field is constantly changing, as evidenced by the NLM plan. I received my MLIS in 1986 (from the same school my grandmother received her MLS) and if I hadn’t been adept at life-long learning, I wouldn’t be where I am now. So I want to finish up with some reminders that will keep you thinking ahead and growing your skillset. Coincidentally, as I started this list with Curiosity and Communication, then added Collaboration and Challenge, I realized they all started with C, so I went with it for the last couple of traits.