Steal this idea: A library instructors’ guide to educating students in data management skills

Abstract

Academic librarians are increasingly called on to offer training and educational programming on wide-ranging topics to our campus affiliates from information literacy, authors’ rights, emerging publishing models, and the latest tools to manage citations and personal information. Recent funding requirements to increase access to the digital data resulting from federally funded research have highlighted an additional area of need for better data management skills and best practices for data sharing.

This shift prompted the Data Information Literacy project, an IMLS-funded project bringing together librarians and researchers from Purdue University, Cornell University, University of Oregon, and University of Minnesota (UMN) to better understand and address the data management skills needed by students on our respective campuses.

This article provides a big-picture overview of the work conducted by UMN to meet the data literacy needs of our graduate students. We’ve adapted our instructional approach to data management over the years.

We started with an online, self-paced course4 in 2012 and then, based on student need and feedback, transformed the training into a comprehensive, multidisciplinary “flipped classroom” five-session workshop series.

After we show you what we’ve done, we’ll tell you how you can take the content we’ve created and re-use, adapt, and repurpose it for your own students.