Upskilling Academic Librarians for Data Management Services

Abstract

Over the last two years, in an effort to increase expertise and support for data management services, the University of Kentucky Libraries (UKL) has endeavoured to upskill library faculty and staff on research data management skills and best practices. This began with the formation of a special task-force charged with developing a workshop in the spring of 2015 for academic librarians with liaison responsibilities. This workshop focused on the research data life cycle and included presentations from nine speakers from campus who provide various types of data management support. The success of this workshop led to the creation of the Research Data & Scholarly Communications (RDSC) Committee in the fall of 2016. The RDSC is charged with continuing to develop training opportunities for library faculty and staff and the university community, as well as with developing a plan for distributed, yet cohesive data management services at the UKL – a task that has been a challenge given the lack of a dedicated data librarian. In regard to the first charge, which is directly related to upskilling for RDM services, the RDSC developed a spring, 2017 series of nine workshops for library faculty and staff and members of the University of Kentucky’s School of Information Science (SIS). Planning for 2017/18 workshops and training events is currently underway. The response from the original workshop and the subsequent series of nine workshops has been overwhelmingly positive, and assessment results show that workshop participants feel more confident in their knowledge of research data management.