The Challenges and Opportunities of Providing Research Data Services: Perspectives From a Cross-section of Institutions

Session Type: Presentation/Panel

Session Description:
Researchers need help managing, organizing, and archiving their data. Although the need is not new, researchers’ requests for libraries to provide services and assistance has recently seen an increase. This is in part because of recent mandates by funders and journals to manage and/or share research data. For libraries, the mandate provides an opportunity to extend their historic charge to care for and preserve their institutions’ scholarly assets into the realm of data.

In response to the recent increased interest in data stewardship among researchers, libraries are extending their services, increasing their outreach and education, or developing other strategies to engage the research community at their institutions. The UC Curation Center (UC3) at the California Digital Library has made efforts to package services in a comprehensive, optimized fashion to ensure usability. With the addition of DataUp (a tool for managing and describing Excel research data), links to the DataONE community, and improvements to the Merritt repository, EZID and the DMPTool, the UC3 has extended services with an understanding of the research data management life cycle. Other university libraries are increasing availability of training workshops and education in data management practices, and developing research services based on the needs of their unique user community in this era of digital data.

This session includes a panel discussion of how best to meet both researchers’ and libraries’ needs throughout the research data life cycle. We will explore questions such as: What have we learned? Where can we improve? What are the challenges we should begin planning for now? This panel will bring together service managers from the UC3, librarians from the UC Santa Cruz and UCLA campuses that utilize UC3 services, and two librarians from institutions outside the UC system (University of Washington and the University of Virginia) that are facing similar challenges and questions. We will briefly cover new services and improvements at UC3 and at the panelists’ institutions, introduce challenges and opportunities for growth of library services supporting research data in general, and discuss successful collaborations that have resulted in important tools and resources for the research community. We will then have a moderated discussion of research data services and their distribution to the community.

Session Leaders:
Lisa Federer, University of California Los Angeles
Sherry Lake, University of Virginia
Susan Chesley Perry, University of California Santa Cruz
Joan Starr, California Digital Library
Carly Strasser, California Digital Library
Perry Willett, California Digital Library
Stephanie Wright, University of Washington

Session Notes:
View the community reporting Google doc for this session!