We are pleased to announce that in May 2015 a proposal submitted on behalf
of L4RD for an RDA/Sloan Fellow was awarded, one of eight chosen out of 37
submissions. Cheryl Thompson, who is completing a PhD in Library and
Information Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, is our
Fellow and will be conducting a study on library organizational support
for research data management.
Cheryl brings ten years of experience working as a data and project manager
on several funded projects in social research and as a research data
coordinator at the Odum Institute at UNC-Chapel Hill. Her current studies
at UIUC have introduced her to interdisciplinary research teams and to
different organizational structures for supporting data.
Working with Michael Witt and myself, Cheryl will seek to identify patterns
in organizational approaches to providing data services and will undertake
the following tasks:
1. a survey of participating L4RD members;
2. a review of related content on the web from those sampled, e.g.,
strategic plans, org charts, unit and position titles and descriptions,
library resource guides and websites, job ads, etc.; and
3. an analysis to identify and describe organizational patterns from
these data.
These findings will be contrasted to recent work by OCLC on reorganizing
and restructuring research libraries, comparing results for both trends and
benchmarks.
Findings will be summarized in a conference poster and detailed in a draft
briefing paper. Cheryl will collect and analyze the majority of these data
between June and August 2015 with a poster to be presented at the 7th RDA
Plenary and a draft briefing paper to be considered by L4RD at the 8th RDA
Plenary.
Michael Witt and I will be serving at Cheryl's mentors for this project.
Thanks,
Chuck Humphrey
Research Data Management Coordinator
University of Alberta
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Author: Jane Greenberg
Date: 10 Jun, 2015
Congratulations to the RDA-libresearch data group, Chuck, MichaelŠ andŠof
course Cheryl!
Best wishes, jane
Author: Kevin Ashley
Date: 11 Jun, 2015
Chuck
This is indeed good news. However, I would like to make an observation
and/or suggestion which I hope will increase the quality of the outputs that
this work will produce. Your email says that Cheryl will be undertaking a survey
of participating L4RD members. I think that will produce a skewed sample -
the membership tends to consist of those libraries who have been leading
work in this area *and* who have the resources to take part in groups like
this. One of the reasons we (the DCC) are involved in the group is to channel
information to and from the much wider set of research libraries that we're
involved with in the UK who also have research data services. There are other
organisations in other countries performing a similar role.
We would be happy to get engagement in this survey from that wider group in the
UK, and I think it would be useful to try to do this in other countries as well.
Is it feasible to do this?
thanks
Kevin