IDEA: Improving Data Engagement and Advocacy

That's a wrap on season three of IDEA! As in seasons past, we're celebrating with our interviewees one final time as we ask them a new set of data management questions: If your role in research data management had a motto, what would it be? What’s the most creative solution you’ve seen to encourage researchers to embrace data management? If you could host a workshop on one exciting aspect...

In this episode, we’re thrilled to welcome Amber Gallant, Data Services Librarian at Royal Roads University, who will be sharing with us details about her innovative project, Byte-Sized Data Encounters. Amber was faced with the challenge of teaching doctoral students with limited time and the unique needs of a largely online program adoptable data management skills and she adopted an extremely cre...

Today, we will be reporting on Researcher Challenges and Experiences with Data Services, published March 27, 2025, by Chelsea McCracken and Ruby MacDougall with ITHAKA S+R. ITHAKA S+R has worked with 29 US and Canadian institutions over the past 2 years to gather relevant information to improve the coordination of research data services. The project has conducted a landscape survey of data service...

In this episode, we’re diving into a topic that’s gaining momentum across the research data community—assigning persistent identifiers, or PIDs, to instruments and facilities. As the research ecosystem continues to push toward greater transparency, reproducibility, and FAIR practices, recognizing the role of the tools and spaces where research happens has become increasingly important. But assigni...

In this episode, Briana and Shannon discuss an article that shares a novel development in the research data management engagement and support space - an AI virtual consultant designed by researchers at the University of Mannheim to address the persistent challenges researchers face in implementing FAIR data principles. This represents a groundbreaking approach to simplifying complex data managemen...

Data professionals often ask themselves: how can we make research data literacy and data management training more engaging, interactive, and fun? In this episode, we explore two highly innovative and creative approaches designed to enhance understanding and transform how researchers interact with key concepts in research data and data management.  Alessandra Soro (she/her) is a Community Manager w...

In open science, universities are key to fostering adoption of best practices and can encourage these best practices through academic evaluation processes. Promotion and tenure committees are one of these processes. Committees often have the capability to evaluate articles and books, but assessing data and software is a recent development for which there are few guidelines.  In this episode, Shann...

To kick off the season, we're excited to highlight a new resource designed to help researchers strengthen their data management practices. We're speaking with Kristin Briney, the creator of the Research Data Management Workbook—a practical tool packed with hands-on exercises that guide researchers through key phases of the data lifecycle. We’ll explore the workbook's unique exercises a...

As season 2 of IDEA comes to a close, join us in hearing one last time from our interviewees as we ask all of them a new set of research data management themed questions. How do you measure the success of a researcher engagement activity? What do you think the next big trend in research data management is? What is your favorite form of researcher engagement and why? An episode a year in the making...

The Collections as Data initiative aims to expand the uses of archival data collections by making them more accessible, particularly in forms ready for computationally driven research and teaching. This initiative makes the data from these collections available so that researchers and the public can engage with them. In this episode, we have the pleasure of speaking with Daria Orlowska, Data Libra...

In this episode, Shannon and Briana delve into the recently published NSF funded Realities of Academic Data Sharing (RADS) Initiative's report titled, "Making Research Data Publicly Accessible: Estimates of Institutional & Researcher Expenses." The report provides a retrospective analysis of the costs incurred by six academic institutions in making research data publicly accessib...

In today’s episode, we have the pleasure of speaking with data stewards from the University of Vienna, who’ve created a training program with courses catering to PhD students, technical staff, and specific disciplines. The training covers general data management and specific topics such as support for particular infrastructure. And not only are they offering this training to their community, but t...

Shannon and Briana discuss the article: A Tiered Model for Data Management, Curation, and Sharing Support in Grant Proposals and Budgets in the Journal of eScience Librarianship. This case study discusses differing levels of support for researchers during projects, challenges arising from the tiered support model, and monitoring metrics from those using the services. Article citation: Johnson, A.,...

There are many examples of embedded data curators that different institutions use to support their researchers' data management practices. But no two programs seem to work in the same way, or exist in the same setting. In this episode, we’re going to hear about an embedded data management and curation support service in the context of a US national lab, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. T...

Shannon and Briana discuss the article "The Effects of Research Data Management Services: Associating the Data Curation Lifecycle with Open Research Output" published in ACRL. They discuss how institutional contexts can influence a researcher's ability and desire to produce open data products, the impact of investing in RDM services and resources, and whether the data curation lifecy...

Research increasingly requires working with both large amounts of data as well as diverse types of data. Additionally, data reuse is being encouraged as a means to build on previous research and to enable answering larger and more complex problems through combining data sources. So, how can data producers make their data more openly available and reusable? And how can generating data and providing...

For the season finale, we're doing something a little different. As we've interviewed our guests over the course of the year, we've been asking each group same set of four questions, all related to research data management. What makes something an engagement opportunity? How do you define a dataset? What one piece of information do you wish all researchers knew about RDM? And what’s th...

With the increased focus on research reproducibility and transparency, new policies, practices, and principles have been established for research data management. As this area has and continues to rapidly change, we have also seen the development of research data management services to support researchers in adopting or adapting practices to meet these new expectations. But what form have these se...

A lot of engagement work with researchers centers around supporting their efforts to make the data underlying their research publicly available. It’s a critical step to advancing science and increasingly a requirement from different funders and publishers. Institutions have responded by developing and offering a variety of services to support their researchers. So how well are these services worki...

How an institution models their research data support services can substantially impact engagement with researchers, including the frequency, duration, or opportunity. In this episode, Shannon and Briana discuss a recent report from the Research Data Alliance Professionalising Data Stewardship Interest Group. They provide a brief synopsis of the nearly 50-page report and highlight some of the most...

Researchers are increasingly needing to know about software management, quality, accessibility, and sustainability in support of Open Science efforts and research reproducibility. However, standard practices or principles are not always applied to software and how researchers learn to manage software is often not formalized. In this episode, we will be learning how the Software Horror Escape Room...

Shannon and Briana discuss the article “ Data Management Planning for an Eight-Institution, Multi-Year Research Project ” published in the International Journal of Digital Curation. They provide a brief rundown of how researchers in this case study leveraged data management plans to support coordination of a complex, multi-institution, and multi-year research project, provide insight into how the...

With the rise in data intensive research and institutional, funder, and publishing requirements for data management and sharing, there is a lot of opportunity for education and engagement around how to best address data management during the research process. Researchers are increasingly needing support with how to properly manage their research outputs and develop workflows that support research...

Shannon and Briana discuss the article “Promoting and Enabling Reproducible Data Science Through a Reproducibility Challenge” published in the Harvard Data Science Review. They provide a brief rundown of how the authors ran their reproducibility challenge, what lessons they learned from the challenge participants, and their arguments for why universities—their data science centers and research sup...

As research changes; becoming more data and computationally intensive, it is necessary for researchers to possess strong data management, data information literacy and data science skills. Research Data Service units in University Libraries themselves and in collaboration with disciplinary experts are well suited to offer training that bridges the gap between theoretical knowledge and application-...