Research Data Management in the Curriculum: An Interdisciplinary Approach

Abstract

Research Data Management is broadly understood as collecting, analyzing, publishing, reanalyzing, critiquing, and reusing data. The increase of digital content in the broad areas of Institutional and domain specific Repositories, Libraries, Archives and Museums and the increased interest in the sharing and preservation of "research data" have triggered the emergence of new roles such as Data Curator. The paper refers about the on-going investigation of current data curator education and training programs with regard to the role of information professionals and/or data scientists in the research lifecycle. The investigation has been based on a series of workshops and events discussing the concerns of researchers and teachers about digital library and digital curation. A first list of competencies and skills at technical and operational level that professionals should have, has been evidenced. The theoretical framework and structure of educational programmes should have sufficient flexibility to accommodate the needs of various groups of specialists.

Academic libraries’ role in Research Data Management Services: a South African perspective

“…These exercises will go a long way to addressing the much-needed skillset in this emerging service area within academic and research libraries. Tammaro and Casarosa (2014) concluded in their investigation about the need for RDM in the curriculum to be an interdisciplinary approach, that data curation should move to be "beyond providing technology for storage and preservation, to embrace changes in scholarly production that emerging technologies have brought, to make sense of the digital curator as a whole".…”

Changes in academic libraries in the era of Open Science

“…However, it requires expansion of the qualifications of the librarians beyond library science and subject degrees toward statistics, data science and information technologies. As Tammaro and Casarosa (2014) outlined, librarians must have knowledge and understanding as to how the curation of digital resources differs from that of traditional materials and how to manage them. They must understand subject vocabulary, concepts and culture and to be able to understand the possible implications (in technical, institutional, economic and legal terms) of assuming the responsibility for long-term digital curation, providing guidance and support.…”

Preserving digital heritage

“…PMPs extending DMPs should automatically enable the following processes: capture processes, workflows and their dependencies; verify correctness of re-execution and re-use of data and workflows; identify subsets of data in large and dynamic databases; assign PIs to time-stamped query; capture all elements of a research process; cite data, etc. Needless to say that the development of DMP requires a certain degree of cooperation between a number of agents responsible for a wide range of Digital (Data) Curation phases (DCC, 2014;Ganguly, 2015;IFLA, 2012;Tammaro and Casarosa, 2014; UC Curation Center).…”