I was fortunate to receive a 2025 RDAP Summit scholarship that allowed me to attend the Summit. I am the Public Health and Science Librarian at California State University, Sacramento, and our university just became an R2 institution this year. With this reclassification, our library anticipates a greater need for research data services. The RDAP Summit provided me with great insight into how other libraries run and implement their services. It also gave me a platform to more widely share a project I had worked on in collaboration with University of Minnesota librarians as a participant in the Data Services Continuing Professional Education (DSCPE) program. I presented a lightning talk on our experience incorporating CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance into an institutional data repository ["Taking Steps to Integrate CARE Principles Into Institutional Data Repositories: A DSCPE Project"], and I was happy to see so many other members of my DSCPE cohort also present their projects.

One of the sessions that was the most helpful was "Domain Repository Not Available: Developing Guidance for Researchers Using Generalist Repositories", presented by Lisa Curtin and Crystal N. Steltenpohl. Although we have an institutional repository, it is not equipped to handle large data files or all data file types. We don’t currently have the funding or infrastructure to create a data repository, so this session gave me ideas for how to educate our faculty/researchers on other open repositories they can use to satisfy funder mandates. The repository comparison chart and the repository selection flowchart the presenters shared will be especially useful resources to provide guidance for researchers, and the education component is low cost enough to make it feasible to implement.

I was also inspired by the amazing closing keynote where Casey Fiesler presented on the ethics of collecting data from fandom communities. Fiesler discussed questions we should ask ourselves as the data collector, who really owns the data collected, and how research should be mutually beneficial for researchers and the communities being studied. Many of these questions aligned with aspects of the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance. The ethics, privacy and ownership considerations discussed are not always the same concerns that funders and researchers are required to address, but that does not mean they should be overlooked when researchers decide how to analyze, publish, and share the data. These aspects are definitely things I will consider and bring to the attention of researchers going forward when advising on data management and sharing plans.

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