UW Data Librarians to Present at ACRL

UW data librarians will be presenting in both a panel and poster session at ACRL 2015, both of which will be on the topic of research data management instruction.

At poster session 2 (Thursday, 3/26, 2-3pm in the Convention Center Exhibit Hall), Mahria Lebow and Jenny Muilenburg will be presenting results from their data management-focused session at 2014's Science Boot Camp West. "Using Active Learning Techniques to Engage Academic Librarians in Research Data Management" will illustrate the techniques they used to engage librarians in a non-introductory, 200-level research data management workshop meant to introduce attendees to RDM concepts in a hands-on way. Live polling and group work was used to generate questions, conversations and learning about various RDM topics.

The poll questions were a great way to both engage attendees and spark conversation, by letting audience members respond anonymously, while at the same time seeing how others in the audience were responding. Workshop attendees were quite positive in their feedback of the techniques used in the session, and in particular the polling section was effective. Poll questions are online at tinyurl.com/m9hvrue.

On Friday morning (3/27, 8:30-9:30am, Room A105 in the Convention Center), Jenny Muilenburg, Amanda Whitmire and Heather Coates will present on a panel titled "Promoting Sustainable Research Practices Through Effective Data Management Curricula." This session will detail how each librarian developed a strategy for teaching research data management in different contexts. Each will address how they created their content, assessed their effectiveness, and plans for future directions.

And in case you missed it in a previous post, a full list of data management planning programs at ACRL2015 is available at http://goo.gl/KUlI6y.

Special Journal Issue Focuses on Data Literacy and Librarians

Time for some reading: the latest issue of the Journal of eScience Librarianship focuses on the role of librarians in data literacy. Included are articles on data management education initiatives, designing RDM curriculum for librarians and graduate students, as well as some case studies from different institutions that used the New England Collaborative Data Management Curriculum in order to teach RDM to various constituencies.

Also featured is an "eScience in Action" piece titled Lessons Learned from a Research Data Management Pilot Course at an Academic Library, from the UW's own Mahria Lebow, Jennifer Muilenburg, and Joanne Rich, detailing their experience teaching a research data management course to graduate students in early 2014.

We're hoping to set aside some time to read through these articles in the next few weeks, and will hope to include some reaction here. Stay tuned!

Guide to Research Data Management Curriculum

In many of my workshops and class sessions, especially for librarians new to data management, I've been asked about existing research data management (RDM) curriculum and resources. People new to the field want to be able to browse online learning courses, join mailing lists to see what's going on, follow a blog or two. After compiling a few of these lists to serve as handouts, I decided to put them online in a LibGuide for Research Data Management Curriculum. In a way a curated list of these things feels very Yahoo 1990s, but it allows me a place to keep tabs on new curricula, blogs and other resources that I or my coworkers use on a regular basis.

Got any favorite sites/classes/blogs/lists you'd like to see on the list? Put it in the comments and I'll take a look.

Data Librarianship Workshops

Beginning in September, Data Services Curriculum and Communications Librarian Jenny Muilenburg will be offering three Data Librarianship Workshops to librarians and staff who work with people using data. Designed to teach some of the essential concepts necessary for those working in a data support role, these workshops will cover data management plans, data librarian skills, repositories and archives, and data best practices (among others!).

Prior to each workshop there will be a small amount of readings/videos/research for attendees to complete. This will allow workshop attendees to begin with the same background knowledge, as well as enable us to share what we all bring from our different fields/positions.

Session 1, Monday, September 8, 2-3:30pm

Data Librarianship: Skills and Definitions

Curious what it means to be a “data librarian”? This workshop will look at the skills and traits necessary to work as a data librarian, whether or not your current position includes that description, as well as what other libraries and institutions are providing in the way of data support and guidance. We’ll also talk about how to gain various kind of education and training to better support data-intensive research.

Session 2, Monday, January 26, 2-3:30pm

Data Librarianship: Archives & Repositories

There are so many archives and repositories out there it can be difficult to know where to start looking to help someone in your field (or especially a field you’re not familiar with).This workshop will look at some of the categories of archives and repositories, and we’ll have time to share some of the similarities and differences across disciplines. We’ll also talk about some of the usage and ethics considerations that come into play when researchers share their data.

Session 3, Monday, April 20, 2-3:30pm

Data Management Plans: Reading, Writing, and Sharing

The words “data management plan” get tossed around a lot in certain circles. In this session, we’ll spend time learning about the different disciplinary and/or agency requirements for DMPs. We’ll also have an opportunity to read case studies from several disciplines, and learn how to help someone create their own DMP using various resources and tools from the UW Libraries.

For more information, contact us at uwlib-data at uw dot edu.

Research Data Management Workshops: Lessons Learned

From January 22 to March 5, 2014, three University of Washington librarians offered a seven-week course in research data management. As a complement to the two workshops we offered in 2013, which were geared toward research data management basics for librarians, this series was aimed at graduate students, primarily in the School of Forest and Environmental Sciences, Biology, Engineering, the iSchool and Health Sciences.

We ran the course as a pilot of the New England Collaborative Data Management Curriculum. Jenny Muilenburg, Mahria Lebow and Joanne Rich worked together to offer the class, which was designed as a one-hour meeting with lecture and exercises, meeting once a week for seven weeks. Students were asked to register, but the classes were not required, and no credit was given. Each of the weeks touched on one concept from the NECDMC curriculum, with one change made mid-course that combined two concepts into one lecture. We took each lecture module from NECDMC and modified it to suit our personal and institutional preferences, as well as adding UW-specific information. One primary lecture room was used on the main campus, where we both recorded the lecture and streamed it to a second location in Health Sciences, where Joanne Rich facilitated the streamed lecture and ran the exercises off-air.

Each class consisted of about 30 minutes of lecture, and 30 minutes of exercise and discussion. Module topics included types, stages and formats of data; metadata; storage, backup and security; legal and ethical considerations; sharing and reuse; and archiving and preservation. Experts from on campus were asked to contribute opinions and UW-specific information, specifically on metadata, storage and security, and legal and ethical information. Overall class evaluations after each lecture were positive, with good feedback about what to include in future iterations of the class.

It was a great first foray into RDM curriculum for non-librarians, although attendance with attrition was not as good as we'd hoped. Our next move will be to take this experience and the curriculum, modify and shorten, and present it to subject-specific librarian groups on campus. I'd like to see one for STEM disciplines and the social sciences, and the health science librarians are working on one for their disciplines. More information will be forthcoming as we pull together what we've learned and where we'll go from here.