Expanding Research Data Management Education for Librarians & Health Sciences Affiliates at the University of Minnesota Duluth

Purpose:
The Expanding Research Data Management Education grant by the Bio-Medical Library, University of Minnesota proposed activities to achieve two primary goals. The first was to enable health science librarians across the Greater Midwest Region (GMR) to build research data management knowledge and skills and to develop actionable steps to provide data management services at their libraries. The second was to enable health science faculty and graduate/professional students at the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD) to better understand data management best practices, be better positioned to prepare more competitive grant proposals, and learn about the benefits of preparing datasets for preservation, sharing, and re-use.

Setting/Participants/Resources:
We offered a half-day continuing education workshop to 21 librarians in August 2018. GMR librarians had the initial opportunity to apply for $1000 travel stipend to attend the training in Minneapolis, MN. Caitlin Bakker presented the session and she organized and moderated a monthly, online Data Management Community of Practice (CoP) to support the ongoing development of librarian data management skills through the duration of the funding period. The CoP ran from September 2018-May 2019.

The second activity was a half-day research data management workshop for students, faculty and staff at the University of Minnesota Duluth. Thirty-two participants from the Medical School, College of Pharmacy and other colleges attended the session in January 2019. Six librarians from the Bio-Medical Library traveled to Duluth to present the content. In addition to the workshop, the following morning four UMD affiliates met with the workshop trainers to consult on various research data management topics.

Results/Outcomes:
Our evaluations show that the original project goals and objectives were met. The overwhelming
majority of attendees of the ‘Data Management for Librarians’ CE indicated they either ‘strongly agreed’ or ‘somewhat agreed’ with questions asking about their ability to explain key aspects of research data management in the health sciences (21 out of 21 responses), identify opportunities to integrate data services into their existing roles (19 out of 21 responses), ability to compare and contrast different data repositories for sharing and retrieval (17 out of 21 responses), ability to apply best practices to the creation of a data management plan (19 out of 21 responses), and ability to assess a data management plan and suggest ideas for improvement (20 out of 21 responses).

There were similar evaluation results reported by the attendees of the event at UMD.
Attendees reported that they either ‘strongly agreed’ or ‘somewhat agreed’ with questions asking about their ability to define a research project, the steps involved and identify places in the process where things can break down (24 out of 25 responses), ability to break down the data management process into concrete steps and actions (24 out of 24 responses), acquired a basic understanding of relevant legal, institutional policies (21 out of 25 responses), knowledge of grant requirements for long-term storage (18 out of 21 responses), awareness of subject repositories and journal data policies (24 out of 24 responses), and having a basic understanding of how to plan for data retention and control after completion of a research project (23 out of 25 responses).

Evaluation Method:
We used Qualtrics to distribute our evaluation surveys after each activity (librarian CE, UMD workshop, librarian CoP) and asked participants to rank their agreement with various questions via a five-point Likert scale ranging from “strongly agree” to “not applicable.”