At this year’s RDAP conference, I picked up a number of helpful tips for increasing the library’s involvement in data services. I belong to an R1 institution; however, our library doesn’t play a particularly active role in the data services provided on campus. As our Scholarly Communication Librarian, I manage our institutional repository and, as such, I am excited to have taken away a few more strategies for supporting researchers in the era of the Nelson memo.
From Iratxe Puebla’s keynote address, I discovered that our datasets—though they have assigned DOIs—may not be getting great exposure in the Data Citation Corpus. I hadn’t heard of the Make Data Count project and am looking forward to investigating further. Along similar lines, Ali Krzton delivered a lightning talk highlighting the need to enrich DataCite records with metadata maintained in repositories. This is something that our datasets would also benefit from as we have sometimes used rather minimal metadata when registering DOIs in DataCite.
I was interested to hear as well about data catalogs, as described by Anthony Dellureficio and Klara Pokrzywa from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. At Washington State University (WSU), we use an Ex Libris product for our institutional repository. It’s a tool that emphasizes integration between various kinds of scholarly outputs, but I am still intrigued by the capabilities of the data catalog to track use/reuse of datasets while also connecting researchers. I’m looking forward to investigating further, and I’m also interested in reaching out to our instruction team to see if we can try out some relatively low-stakes opportunities for increasing engagement around data. For instance, Elena Azadbakht and Teresa Schultz described a promising technique for delivering data management tips via email, using incentives to encourage campus involvement. We’ve tried something similar at WSU and I think we would benefit from circling back to this idea with some tweaks and improvements.
Many thanks to the presenters at RDAP for sharing their ideas and the Membership Committee for allowing me to participate in this year’s conference.
