Supporting Research Data Management and Open Science in Academic Libraries: a Data Librarian’s View

Abstract

The ‘data revolution’ has impacted researchers across the disciplines. As if the traditional work of teaching, competing for grants and promotion, doing research and publishing results was not challenging enough, researchers are required to make fundamental changes in the way they do all of these things. A similar shift can be seen for academic librarians. Librarians who were taught to meet the needs of their users based on information scarcity now need to retrain themselves to help users deal with information overload. Moreover, librarians increasingly find themselves ‘upstream’ in the research process, trying to assist their users in managing unwieldy amounts of data when their comfort zone is firmly ‘downstream’ in the post-publication stage. Unsettling as it may be, these are exciting developments for the library profession.

Keywords

• research data management
• open science
• academic libraries