John Borghi
CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow
University of California Curation Center (UC3), California Digital Library
Daniella Lowenberg
Research Data Specialist & Product Manager
University of California, California Digital Library
“Bridging Communities of Practice: Developing Data Management Tools for Researchers and Service Providers” (Borghi)
Researchers are faced with an evolving array of expectations related to how they manage and share their data. Academic libraries are well positioned to provide research data management (RDM) support owing to their extensive expertise in curating and preserving information. However, researchers and data service providers often have significantly different perceptions and priorities when it comes to research data. To overcome this difficulty, the University of California Curation Center (UC3) at California Digital Library is developing a customizable set of tools that frame data-related practices using language and terminology familiar to researchers. At present, these tools include a rubric that builds upon existing maturity-based tools that enables researchers to self-assess their current practices and a series of guides that provide actionable information about how to comply with current and future data-related requirements. This briefing will cover the development of these tools, how they can be customized for individual disciplinary and institutional communities, and how they can be applied to facilitate communication between researchers and data service providers.
“Where Is the Adoption? Lessons Learned from Researchers about Open Data” (Lowenberg)
While there are many open repositories and policies, adoption still remains low both in publishing and re-using open data. At the California Digital Library, Dash, an open source, standards-based platform for researchers to publish and get credit for their research data, was created to address this challenge. Because our focus has been on adoption, we have found that researchers often do not understand open data-related policies and terminology and generally do not look to the library for help or advice. Researcher requests for features to open up data have also been starkly different from those requested by library, publisher, and institutional stakeholders. Working across the research landscape via interviews, workshops, and user testing at the University of California we have collected what we believe is evidence of what researchers believe is necessary for a greater open data adoption. This session will focus on the stories and requests we collected as well as our implementation in Dash.