The University Library's research services team are celebrating International Love Data Week which runs from 10 - 14 February 2020. We support researchers and PhD students, in learning about effective data management practices, services and tools as well as how to organise your data, and advise on routes for data deposit, ensuring that, where feasible, you can make your research data outputs open, accessible, and discoverable for others to discover and reuse.
We are publishing a series of themed blog posts this week on a variety of research data management topics and we are of course always available for face-to-face research data consultations to chat about your research and data outputs, providing support for data management plans, outreach and advocacy within departments and colleges, and we provide and support the research data infrastructure Figshare at Leicester, for those who wish to deposit their data in our institutional data repository, when a disciplinary one is not available.
The hashtag for Love Data Week is #lovedata20 and our fifth and final posting is around skills and workforce development around RDM and associated services within our University Library.
As a health and life sciences librarian who moved from an open access/scholarly communications background into RDM I am only too aware of what a very, very, steep learning curve it was to feel confident working within the area of RDM service delivery. I was very fortunate because I worked with an established researcher as project lead on a large Jisc-funded RDM project at the University of Nottingham, ADMIRe from 2012 - 2013. It seems an awful long time ago now, but in many ways I am still interested in skills, competencies, and the delivery of RDM services (even though RDM is no longer my full-time focus).
As described in an earlier blog post the research services team still regularly attend external events, where the theme is focused around skills to support RDM. Two library colleagues and I attended a MERCIAN RDM event at the University of Birmingham last year, which was interesting and thought provoking, particularly the keynote from Dr Eddy Verbaan - who provoked us to think about what skills were required to enact the data revolution - and to reflect and celebrate on what we have achieved so far, and to have a critical eye on our planning, service priorities and strategy when we think about what we still need to achieve.
Locally we have just completed a year-long training programme for our academic librarians at Leicester on scholarly communications (focus was RDM and OA). RDM services sits with the research services team and the RDM portfolio is led by Dr Radek Pajor. What we know though is that RDM service delivery requires more than just one person, we need to collaborate with all other interested stakeholders, partners, and colleagues. So what resources did I explore and use when I was planning and delivering our local training programme? Here are a couple I used in my teaching, and which I thought added value to our training programme:
The Jisc RDM Toolkit contains a variety of resources on RDM, with links to external online courses and guides.
One of my favourite training resources is the Australian National Data Service (ANDS) 23 (research data) Things I really enjoyed working with this resource, its flexibility and the fact you can choose a level of complexity for the exercises - a great resource. Then earlier this week I noted that this resource is now available on GitHub - great news.
A resource I often go back to, which I think is still useful is the DCC RDM for Librarians resources.
This week I also registered to participate in The Research Data Management Librarian Academy (RDMLA). This is a free online professional development program for librarians and information professionals. No harm in refreshing those skills and competencies!
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Image source: Laura ORegan, Images Of Research 2017. figshare. Dataset. https://doi.org/10.25392/leicester.data.7976960.v1. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
As a health and life sciences librarian who moved from an open access/scholarly communications background into RDM I am only too aware of what a very, very, steep learning curve it was to feel confident working within the area of RDM service delivery. I was very fortunate because I worked with an established researcher as project lead on a large Jisc-funded RDM project at the University of Nottingham, ADMIRe from 2012 - 2013. It seems an awful long time ago now, but in many ways I am still interested in skills, competencies, and the delivery of RDM services (even though RDM is no longer my full-time focus).
As described in an earlier blog post the research services team still regularly attend external events, where the theme is focused around skills to support RDM. Two library colleagues and I attended a MERCIAN RDM event at the University of Birmingham last year, which was interesting and thought provoking, particularly the keynote from Dr Eddy Verbaan - who provoked us to think about what skills were required to enact the data revolution - and to reflect and celebrate on what we have achieved so far, and to have a critical eye on our planning, service priorities and strategy when we think about what we still need to achieve.
Locally we have just completed a year-long training programme for our academic librarians at Leicester on scholarly communications (focus was RDM and OA). RDM services sits with the research services team and the RDM portfolio is led by Dr Radek Pajor. What we know though is that RDM service delivery requires more than just one person, we need to collaborate with all other interested stakeholders, partners, and colleagues. So what resources did I explore and use when I was planning and delivering our local training programme? Here are a couple I used in my teaching, and which I thought added value to our training programme:
The Jisc RDM Toolkit contains a variety of resources on RDM, with links to external online courses and guides.
One of my favourite training resources is the Australian National Data Service (ANDS) 23 (research data) Things I really enjoyed working with this resource, its flexibility and the fact you can choose a level of complexity for the exercises - a great resource. Then earlier this week I noted that this resource is now available on GitHub - great news.
A resource I often go back to, which I think is still useful is the DCC RDM for Librarians resources.
This week I also registered to participate in The Research Data Management Librarian Academy (RDMLA). This is a free online professional development program for librarians and information professionals. No harm in refreshing those skills and competencies!
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