Developing Library Research Data Services at Flinders University - Data Management Services:
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Research Data Librarians4 / 13
00:00
Data managementWeb serviceLevel (video gaming)Multiplication signAreaProjective planeGroup actionGradientCodeCausalityNoise (electronics)Faculty (division)Slide ruleContext awarenessPrice indexClosed setMUDComputer animation
00:59
Cylinder (geometry)Process (computing)Core dumpData managementService (economics)Repository (publishing)Digital signalOpen setStatistische BeratungStaff (military)AreaCore dumpService (economics)Information technology consultingWeb serviceBitGroup actionUniverse (mathematics)Slide ruleWeb 2.0Condition numberProjective planeLatin squareNetwork topologyGraph coloringBit rateXML
01:50
Pattern recognitionMotion captureProjective planePattern recognitionBootingShared memoryFocus (optics)Multiplication signSinc functionUniverse (mathematics)Representation (politics)Roundness (object)Condition numberVirtualizationData storage deviceBitMetadataData managementDevice driverForcing (mathematics)Shape (magazine)Dependent and independent variablesVideo gameSign (mathematics)Operator (mathematics).NET FrameworkNumberXMLComputer animation
03:48
AreaService (economics)Open setForm (programming)Channel capacityCuboidService (economics)Repository (publishing)SoftwareLatent heatMetadataVector potentialSoftware testingPosition operatorGroup actionMachine visionWave packetInheritance (object-oriented programming)Instance (computer science)Connected spaceForestVideo gameBitAverageMultiplication signXML
05:06
Digital signalComputer networkBootingDigitizingConnected spaceRepository (publishing)Multiplication signBitReflection (mathematics)MereologySoftware developerWave packetStatisticsChainXML
05:49
Open setData managementStaff (military)Open setINTEGRALOnline helpData managementService (economics)AreaBitKnotPersonal digital assistantXML
06:20
Data managementService (economics)PlanningRepository (publishing)Data storage deviceComputer configurationCollaborationismCartesian coordinate systemArc (geometry)Open setSkeleton (computer programming)Personal digital assistantRow (database)DigitizingSet (mathematics)Data managementService (economics)MetadataLocal ringWeb serviceWave packetSoftwareDegree (graph theory)BitPlanningData storage deviceInternet service providerBackupMoment (mathematics)Cartesian coordinate systemGroup actionMaizeOnline helpTablet computerPhysical lawPlotterEmailComputer animation
07:48
Web serviceStaff (military)InformationInformation securityArc (geometry)Service (economics)Digital signalDigitizingInformationData storage deviceFlowchartService (economics)Universe (mathematics)Physical systemTouch typingPersonal digital assistantVirtual machineXMLComputer animation
08:34
Data managementExpected valueExpected valueData managementService (economics)MereologyBitMultiplication signTerm (mathematics)Food energyMoment (mathematics)Proof theoryUniverse (mathematics)Power (physics)Software testingPresentation of a groupGame theoryArithmetic meanMessage passingProcess (computing).NET FrameworkEvent horizonTable (information)Metropolitan area networkChemical equationComputer animation
10:00
Broadcast programmingInclusion mapData storage deviceInformationService (economics)Scheduling (computing)BackupFile archiverPlanningOcean currentAreaQuicksortBitData storage deviceMereologyGroup actionOperator (mathematics)Slide ruleWave packetProjective planeMathematicsData structureMetropolitan area networkDegree (graph theory)Modal logicPerturbation theoryNumberSoftware bugXML
11:23
Arc (geometry)Data storage deviceData managementDigitizingData storage deviceOpen setHypothesisSet (mathematics)MetadataMathematical analysisFile archiverOcean currentInformationBitTouch typingProjective planeCondition numberMetropolitan area networkTexture mapping1 (number)Software testingCartesian coordinate systemJSONXML
13:14
Service (economics)Local ringInclusion mapRoundingStaff (military)AreaUniverse (mathematics)Data managementService (economics)Term (mathematics)Roundness (object)Level (video gaming)BitInclusion mapMereologyMathematicsSet (mathematics)Data storage deviceMultiplication signVideoconferencingRotationGroup actionSoftwareOffice suiteAverageTheory of relativityState of matterSign (mathematics)Data miningXML
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TelecommunicationData managementTelecommunicationAreaChannel capacityView (database)MathematicsMultiplication signMetadataPresentation of a groupDifferent (Kate Ryan album)Data conversionInformationService (economics)Row (database)Set (mathematics)Video gameSkeleton (computer programming)Scaling (geometry)CodecAverageFamilyMassExistencePoint (geometry)Data storage deviceKey (cryptography)XML
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:00
Morning everyone. You could probably tell from this slide that I'm not that great of a snappy subtitle, but I think it would give an indication of what I'm going to cover this morning. Firstly, I wanted to take the opportunity of having the crest on this slide to give you some context about our institution, particularly as we've got people from overseas, which is very exciting. Flinders University is in the southern suburbs of Adelaide in South Australia.
00:24
We have a big more than 1100 academics with a great majority of which are research active. We're a member of the Innovative Research Universities Group in Australia and work across most disciplines with faculties covering health sciences, social and behavioural sciences, education, humanities and law, and science and engineering.
00:46
It's also a great time to be at Flinders as today we've launched our new HUB project. There's lots of dignitaries out on the plaza as I speak, which means for us lots of noise, dust and mud close to the library until about 2016. So within the library, I manage an area called Air Research at Flinders.
01:04
This is made up of right now myself and four other continuing staff with some casual support. That includes two librarians, a technical staff member to help with our systems, and the university statistician. As you can see on the slide for the library, setting up this group is a way of increasing our support for research across the university.
01:25
We use core library skills to deliver the services listed there. Although, I should point out, the statistical consultant does the statistical consulting because I have no talent at all in that area. We also deliver all of those services with the traditional service ethic.
01:41
I've been a little bit of a loud mouth in this area, so if you want to know a little bit more about that, I did do a paper at VALA this year that you can find on the web. So how did all this happen? I guess it's always the most interesting question. We were lucky, we had perfect conditions. Due to earlier work that we'd done in the university to support ERA and much earlier work with setting up the repository,
02:04
when the first ANS projects came along, which Katina's already talked about, the setting the commons and the data capture projects, we were invited in by researchers. So while the library had no responsibility for other of those projects and only played a very small part,
02:20
we were represented on the internal steering committee that oversaw them all. When the time came for the Deputy Vice Chancellor of Research to nominate a Flinders representative for the first ANS boot camps, which I think have been a couple of rounds since then, I was lucky enough to have him choose me, which meant that I came back very enthusiastic and wide-eyed and excited and ready to come and start doing more stuff.
02:46
It also meant that I could build on that knowledge, share it around and make sure that it went across all three projects, rather than just being poured into one. Strategically, on a broader level, there was recognition that the university invested significantly in e-research and that it wasn't cheap.
03:04
So this is a little bit related to the data management area, but not quite there, but it was another driver for us. At the same time, the federal government investment in new tools was ramping up, so the same pot of money that was funding ANS was also funding large-scale data storage and e-research tools, virtual labs and so on.
03:25
And so for the institution, it was time to get an operational focus on getting value out of these things for the university. The timing all was perfect. Once the ANS metadata stores projects came up, the library grabbed one with both hands and used the funding, along with a small restructure, to build e-research vendors around the project for one year.
03:46
And it went okay, because we're still here. Why the library? Why else was the library a good place? And why did the library want to put resources in here when there were plenty of other things we could do? Look, it ticked a lot of boxes for us.
04:00
We had some budding capacity and plenty of enthusiasm, which I've already talked about. We had existing networks and relationships with researchers, as well as the knowledge and experience to have an appreciation of how we could help a researcher. And an understanding over years of dealing with researchers that sometimes providing another form is not necessarily the best way to go.
04:22
We could reuse skills from a smaller group of librarians, particularly in the repository world, and then work on that to use the potential to mainstream the services later on through to metadata specialists and liaison librarians. And lastly for the library, it was a solid move to diversify and strengthen services to support researchers at Flinders,
04:45
which until then had been focused mainly on provision of resources with some very specialised skills in specific disciplines. So for instance, we have a very strong health sciences area, and we've got liaisons with fantastic systematic review searching skills.
05:04
So certainly we've done a lot of work in that area. A little bit of personal reflection following on from what Katina said. Why was it me that got to do it? I'm not sure if it's bad to say it or not, but I was just in the right place at the right time. I was lucky enough to have been involved in setting up our repository and working on HeRA.
05:22
So I made some connections that put me in the middle of things for e-research. Add to that a background in digital resources where I spent a fair amount of time looking at user statistics and trying to demonstrate value for money, and it all came together with what we wanted out of a service for e-research. So no magic wand, no special background, no special training up until that point.
05:42
Just luck. And the training after that, I think you would say, is professional development and taking an active part in things like today. I don't do it by myself. What we're trying to do is to spread these skills. So Liz Walkley Hall, my colleague is the Open Scholarship and Data Management Librarian, and Yasmin Shaheen, who I think might be here today,
06:02
is the e-research support librarian, and we've got some help from casual staff. Because we manage the digital repository, much like Katina's area, we tend to integrate data management services along with everything else. And so we all have a go at all, but make sure that the skills are shared between us.
06:20
A little bit more about the services we provide. We offer assistance with data management planning. We too have a data management planning tool which is integrated into our Redbox software. We are reluctant to let our researchers loose on that by themselves because it wouldn't be a whole lot of fun. So we provide a mediated service where we will help them do that and create a plan for them.
06:44
We do research higher degree candidate training for research data management. And we work with researchers to create metadata for their data sets. So we tend to do that in partnership. Often we'll make it as easy as saying, okay, you've got a data set.
07:01
Have you got any publications that are related to it? Let's try and do a skeleton record and then you'll work with us to make something that looks better. We handle applications to use federally funded data storage. And we smooth the way for moving the data over from wherever it's staying at the moment to a backup or another copy at that federally funded data storage at our local provider eResearch SA.
07:26
We also provide assistance with publisher and funder requirements for open data. So that follows on from what Katina was saying about the PLOS mandate, for example. So as I said, all of these services are mixed in with traditional services to support open access
07:41
publications and digital theses. And I like to think that it makes it easy for researchers to deal with us on all of this stuff. So who do we work with? We are extremely collaborative. It's always good fun. Just picking out a couple of things out of this list. We deal with researchers a lot, obviously. But we also keep in touch with information technology services
08:03
to make sure we know what's going on with their new data storage offerings on campus. We've been working with the Office of Graduate Research on systems to support submission, examination and exposure of digital theses, and talking to our new university archivist on new ways to support regulatory requirements for data storage.
08:24
As Katina was talking about earlier on, we do have state-based requirements, but we don't have a lovely flowchart like the one Katina had, which would be handy. The challenges. I put the challenges in because Natasha put it as a suggestion. So here we go.
08:40
The challenges. Two years in, here they are. It is still new and special, even after two years. And so we do a lot of talking within the institution, and we understand that we're not the center of the university, and we're still not necessarily established in people's minds. We need to keep on reaching out, doing presentations, listing the stuff we do,
09:02
and then showing people the proof that we can do it. So it's still about going out there and doing that marketing. However, all of this takes energy and bounce, which can ebb and flow. And also because the things that we're talking about, particularly in terms of e-research tools and services, are changing the things that we can point people to change as well.
09:23
So every time we talk to people, it's a different story. I've talked a little bit about the e-research tools and services. I guess I just wanted to say again, we've been promoting them as part of our data management services since they were first made available, some of them while they were still coming.
09:41
So we've been laying the groundwork for people to use these fabulous new tools, but not all of them have been delivered on time, which has meant a little bit of expectation management, and at the same time how their sustainability is a little bit unclear at the moment. And so, yeah, there's some massaging to do around that. So those are our big challenges.
10:01
Our successes. I still count still being here two and a bit years later as a success. After the first year, where we were partly funded from a project, the library made us an ongoing part of the structure, and we immediately weaseled ourselves into all sorts of plans and schedules. So you can see there we're on the research high-degree training schedule,
10:21
where in both the information services and the research operational plans. So that means we have KPIs and we have to hit them. So we're still going for now. Other successes. We have supported a number of research groups to take up federally funded data storage at Air Research SA for both data archiving and for current work,
10:43
and sometimes helping to solve issues that have been around for years. So, for example, we have a research area called Airborne Research Australia that had, I think it was about 20 years' worth of data where it had been backed up on terabyte files, and it was really difficult to get enough infrastructure
11:02
to support them in a meaningful way. And so we've been able to help them by transferring another backup to eResearch SA. And now I've put on the slide that people are now starting to come to us because we have been going out and doing that talking, but we're also finding that people are coming to us and then they're coming back again. So it's even nicer to get some repeat business.
11:23
When the ARC, the Australian Research Council, which is a major funder of research projects in Australia, when those requirements came out and called for information on data management planning, it was suddenly Christmas. I was so happy. People were getting in touch and we were actually able to help them.
11:41
So it's always a nice feeling to realise that you do know valuable stuff, that there was stuff that I could tell researchers that they hadn't considered before. We've also had Katina talk about, but I'll mention it again, is having people come to see you to satisfy the publisher open data requirements, and again mentioning PLOS for that.
12:02
People are coming back. We've done, I don't know, several of those just for the one researcher. Digital Theses was a little bit of a surprise. Flinders is a little bit behind many of the Australian institutions in that we've only just mandated submission of digital theses, and e-research at Flinders took over support for that in the middle of this year.
12:21
And so far we've had one thesis with associated data, and it was a beautiful one because it had an open data mandate attached to it from the funder. So we were able to slot it straightaway into our data management workflow. So we're looking forward to unearthing some more data sets that way. And of course the last one is the federally funded data storage.
12:42
I keep talking about it, but it has been a boon. So where we have brokered collaborative data storage, one of the conditions there for archive data sets is that they do need to have metadata created, which we help people with, and if they are going to use the storage for current work, one of the provisos is that some of the data at least
13:02
has to be made available for open access, and we help with the metadata for that once analysis is complete, obviously. So I think those are probably my top four gotchas, which I've been milking mercilessly. Where to next? e-research at Flinders was never about being a specialist data management area
13:24
for the long term. It was going to be a transition of moving skills around the library. So we're doing this by starting to move staff through. We have a new part-time staff member starting in a little over a week, as part of our rotation scheme. But it's also time for us to be thinking about
13:42
stages to mainstreaming our services through the main conduits to our researchers, so that is our liaison librarians. But I don't know about you, but our liaison librarians aren't bored. So we have to wait for other things to happen to see, to move a whole lot of changes at the same time
14:01
to start moving more into that area. Our local IT infrastructure is undergoing radical change. Since the beginning of the year Flinders has been upgrading its entire network. We're now all sitting here with video phones on our desks and it's a very different feeling. So that level of change is continuing throughout the university
14:22
and the tools offered to researchers will continue to improve. So that was why I mentioned earlier on we talk to ITS a fair bit. So the way that we're referring researchers to data storage may change, which is to be expected. Nothing is ever going to stay the same in this area.
14:42
And the next big gotcha that I'm waiting for is for the inclusion of data sets into future rounds of research assessment exercises. So in Australia that is ERA. Reflections, the warm and fuzzies. I think it's fair to say when I was a kid I wanted to be a research chemist. Then the reality of my capacity for maths hit
15:01
and I eventually moved into librarianship. I was thrilled to do it and I still love doing it. But what I didn't expect was that eventually I would end up having fascinating conversations with people like the research chemist that I wanted to be in the first place. And it's really interesting after listening to Katina's presentation and knowing that she started that way and moved into librarianship.
15:22
So there you go. I probably don't have to point out that I'm not a technical person. My view is that you just need to know enough to be able to point people to others who know the right stuff. Just good old-fashioned reference and referral. And if you are in that situation where you're creating metadata for data sets you need to be able to take a chance,
15:41
think outside the square and do your best to come out with a skeleton record that you might not actually understand. Just draw information from different areas and then work with the researcher to make sure that it makes sense. Cultural change. This is no surprise. It takes time and it takes persistence. We've been here for two years in the library.
16:02
There's more change to come. It's changed a lot over two years and it takes a while for culture to catch up with that. And I think the last two are just really obvious that to work in this area and to offer data management services you have to like working with researchers when you can find them.
16:21
And you have to start to understand the rhythms of the academic year and when the grants are being written and all of that stuff. It is good fun. And like so many other things in life communication is key in this. Thank you very much.