Create an All Library Research Data Program

As outlined by the Research Data Services Task Force Report and directed by UL Virginia Steel, implement a cross-library Research Data Program (RDP) led by the Data Science Center with responsibilities for creating a coherent, documented, and integrated program supporting open data science and the full data life-cycle. Composed of data specialists in major areas, such as life & physical sciences, humanities, and social sciences, this program forges partnerships among Library and campus research support units to provide a more coordinated approach to consulting, training, and computing. This program needs to be unified and shares communications, ticketing, and meets regularly for operational and educational needs.

Purpose of Program

The objective of this program is to be a cohesive focal point to support current and emerging data research needs, including compliance with policy requirements imposed by funders/journals and by the University, and reduction of risk associated with the challenges of data stewardship. This program also develops an educational framework that promotes leading practices in open data science, data management, publishing & curation.

This program is critical for delivering services, outreach and education providing a more cohesive set of data services in the Library. The vision for the program is to provide integrated support for all phases of the research process especially as it related to data and computationally intensive research.

The program should have the following attributes:

• members with diverse expertise from different domains and disciplines,
• provide direct support to researchers and encourage co-consulting and cross-pollination of skills,
• develop a sub-program for its own self-education,
• adopt regular meetings that reflect this learning and doing perspective with alternating operational and educational focuses.

There’s clearly a growing multifaceted need on campus and the Library needs a clear voice in articulating solutions for research and computationally intensive inquiry. We propose the RDS program take a progressive approach to articulating and executing services to support campus needs. This roughly follows this path (however we are not prescriptive if this needs to be reworked):

1. organize itself
2. design services
3. determine how they will be positioned, promoted and represented,
4. implement a curriculum for train-the-trainer style to address skills gap and researcher best practices
5. community building around around practices and models for self-efficacy

Expected Behaviors

We expect the program to meet regularly, communicate effectively and organize educational and operational activities.

• Regular meetings (2x a month)
• Shared communication and ticketing system (Slack Channel, Jira Service Desk, Google Shared Drive or Confluence Site)
• Educational and operational - group must execute on consulting & education, but also continue to learn and grow as a team

Measurements of Program

Guiding questions for how the program should be measured:

• Is there a Research Data Program?
• Does it have members from life & physical sciences, humanities, and social sciences?
• Are the members of this program assigned to the program at a significant portion of their job?
• Does it meet regularly for both strategic, operational, & education needs?
• Does this group share responsibility for the program’s articulated services?
• Is there a shared repository of all requests and their ultimate disposition?
• Are there metrics in the way requests are managed? E.g. articulated service benchmarks, service time window.
  • If so, what is rate of response?
• Are there metrics for quality of service (survey of user satisfaction with resolutions)?
• And is this customer customer feedback systematized (automated)?

Potential Membership

• Director, Data Science Center, Chair
• Digital Library Architect
• Data Science Facilitator
• Science Data Informationist
• Scholarly Communication
• Digital Archaeology Lab and Data Publications Manager (Cotsen)
• IDRE/HumTech
• Other UE reps