Data Management for Libraries

Since the National Science Foundation joined the National Institutes of Health in requiring that grant proposals include a data management plan, academic librarians have been inundated with requests from faculty and campus-based grant consulting offices. Data management is a new service area for many library staff, requiring careful planning and implementation. This guide offers a start-to-finish primer on understanding, building, and maintaining a data management service, showing another way the academic library can be invaluable to researchers. Krier and Strasser of the California Digital Library guide readers through every step of a data management plan by

Offering convincing arguments to persuade researchers to create a data management plan, with advice on collaborating with researchers
Laying out all the foundations of starting a service, complete with sample data librarian job descriptions and data management plans
Providing tips for conducting successful data management interviews
Leading readers through making decisions about repositories and other infrastructure
Addressing sensitive questions such as ownership, intellectual property, sharing and access, metadata, and preservation
This Lita Guide will help academic librarians work with researchers, faculty, and other stakeholders to effectively organise, preserve, and provide access to research data.

Author Biography

Laura Krier is a metadata librarian at the California Digital Library in Oakland, California, USA. She works on projects ranging from data modelling and analysis to research into linked data models for libraries. She received an MS from Simmons Graduate School of Library and Information Science and a BA from the University of California Santa Cruz, USA.

Carly A. Strasser is a data curation specialist at the California Digital Library, University of California Office of the President. She has a PhD in biological oceanography, which informs her work on helping researchers better manage and share their data. She is involved in development and implementation of many of the UC Curation Center s services, including the DMPTool (software to guide researchers in creating a data management plan) and DataUp (an application that helps researchers organise, manage, and archive their tabular data).