Partnerships in a Data Management Village: Exploring how research and library services can work together

Abstract

Providing data management services is a task that takes a village; a distributed model of support, involving collaboration among diverse institutional offices, is needed to do it well. Researchers especially benefit when specialized institutional support offices are aware of other relevant providers and the impact their services have on the management of data across the research life cycle. However, once a village is assembled, how do we work with members to be committed collaborators, rather than a passive referral network? In this presentation, we will describe a case study of our in-depth collaboration between the University Libraries and the College of Liberal Arts (CLA) at the University of Minnesota. Both groups are developing new suites of data management services to meet evolving researcher needs and rising demands for data management support. Working together has provided many advantages for sharing resources and knowledge, but also has presented challenges, including how to define the respective roles of college-level and university-wide data management services, and how formalized collaborations may work. We will describe these challenges and how the collective and complementary skills of our offices will provide researchers with support across much larger portions of the research life cycle than either office could provide alone.