Creating and Maintaining a Sustainable Research Data Management Service: Where Do Librarians Fit? Jill Evans, Gareth Cole & Hannah Lloyd-Jones (University of Exeter)

Introduction Who are we? – The Open Exeter ProjectOpen Exeter – JISC funded: looking into Research Data Management issues at the University of Exeter – Inter-departmental

Open Exeter Main work strands: – Follow the Data Working with six PGRs DAF survey – Advocacy and Governance – Technical Development Creation of Exeter Data Archive – Creation of Training Materials Researcher Development Programme (RDP) Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice (PCAP) One-stop shop website Lunch byte workshops

Research Data Management (RDM) What is RDM? Why is it important? Why should librarians be involved? What can research data encompass?

What can Research Data be? Types of data used by participants at the Debate, Discuss and Disseminate Workshop: o Paper, i.e. printouts of experiment o Word documents o Excel spreadsheets o Interview transcripts o Audio files (recordings of interviews) o Mapping data o PDFs o Raw data in CSV form o Post-processed data in text files o Graphs o Tables for literature review o Search data for systematic review o Interviews and surveys: audio files, word transcripts o Photographs o Photocopies of documents from the archives o NVivo files o STATA files

What can Research Data be? (2)

Over To You What do you know about RDM issues? What would you like to know about RDM that you don’t currently know? What training would you like to have on RDM? – What format would you like this training to have?

Training Who for? – Researchers – Professional Services Staff What form should training take? – One-to-one sessions – Workshops – Presentations – Online modules

How Researchers at Exeter want to be Trained

Training (2) What should be included in the training? – Data Management Plans – Organising research material – File and Document Management e.g. versioning – Ethical and confidentiality issues – Bibliographic Software – Institutional Repositories and Open Access – Any others?

What RDM Training Researchers at Exeter want. Training AreaNumber How to Develop a Data Management Plan 144 Organising Research Material123 File and Document Management112 Legal and Ethical Issues115 Bibliographic Software83 Institutional Repositories and Open Access 121

Policy How do librarians fit in? Where do librarians fit in? – Research and Knowledge Transfer staff – Assistant College Managers for Research – Computer Development Officers – Central IT Services Who should have responsibility for what? – Need for a clear structure otherwise researchers will not become engaged

Sustainability - Institutional Needs to be sustainable: – Sticks: Research Councils’ policies Government initiatives on Open Access – Carrots: Increased chances of collaboration for inter-disciplinary research Increased citations for researchers Recognition to researchers for ALL their work Librarians become more integrated and involved in the research process

The Librarian’s role is changing Re-skilling for Research report (January 2012) Re-skilling for Research Evolutionary process As information professionals, academic librarians need to be experts on managing information as well as finding it Increased awareness of the needs of the research community

Any Questions?