Volume 69, Issue 2 -

The data-intensive research environment and the movement towards open science create demand for information professionals with knowledge of the research process and skills in managing and curating data. This paper is reporting the findings from a multiyear study entitled “Data curator: who is s/he?” initiated by the Library Theory and Research (LTR) Section of the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA). The study aimed to identify the roles and responsibilities of data curators around the world and also focused on the terminology used to describe the new professional roles. The following questions were posed: R1: How is data curation defined by practitioners / professional working in the field? R2: What terms are used to describe the roles for professionals in data curation area? R3: What are primary roles and responsibilities of data curators? R4: What are educational qualifications and competencies required of data curators? To answer the research questions, the research team performed a comprehensive literature review and vocabulary analysis and conducted an empirical study using mixed-methods design. The study consisted of three stages: 1. Literature review and vocabulary analysis 2. Content analysis of position announcements 3. Interviews with professionals working in data curation and research data management- Findings confirm the results from previous research about the lack of common terminology and a variability of the position titles. The concept of data lifecycle highlighted the important role of data curators. However this study also found that many positions in practice were held by non library professionals. The findings indicate that data curation is an evolving sociotechnical practice that involves not only technical systems and services structured around research data life cycle but also a range of social activities around community building.

RDS are usually cross-disciplinary, centralised services, which are increasingly provided at a university by the academic library and in collaboration with other RDM stakeholders, such as the Research Office. At research-intensive universities, research data is generated in a wide range of disciplines and sub-disciplines. This paper will discuss how providing discipline-specific RDM support is approached by such universities and academic libraries, and the advantages and disadvantages of these central and discipline-specific approaches. A descriptive case study on the author’s experiences of collaborating with a central RDS at the University of Cambridge, as a subject librarian embedded in an academic department, is a major component of this paper. The case study describes how centralised RDM services offered by the Office of Scholarly Communication (OSC) have been adapted to meet discipline-specific needs in the Department of Chemistry. It will introduce the department and the OSC, and describe the author’s role in delivering RDM training, as well as the Data Champions programme, and their membership of the RDM Project Group. It will describe the outcomes of this collaboration for the Department of Chemistry, and for the centralised service. Centralised and discipline-specific approaches to RDS provision have their own advantages and disadvantages. Supporting the discipline-specific RDM needs of researchers is proving particularly challenging for universities to address sustainably: it requires adequate financial resources and staff skilled (or re-skilled) in RDM. A mixed approach is the most desirable, cost-effective way of providing RDS, but this still has constraints.

Research depends on prior results. The cycle of transforming research output to disseminated knowledge is changing to engage more researchers to openly discover and thereby shape future contributions to scholarship. No established framework helps librarians understand the opportunities that transition offers librarians. However, through four propositions, this paper addresses some of the changes facing academic librarians as they expand their roles: 1) Research cycles embrace interactive sharing and reuse of data; 2) Managing open research data expands librarians’ roles; 3) Intellectual entrepreneurship roles provide a model to empower others; 4) Librarians demonstrate their entrepreneurial leadership by creating partnerships outside the library. Now academic librarians have opportunities to strengthen their role in how higher education shapes research by shifting greater focus toward research data management [RDM]. Two seasoned administrators and librarians illustrate pathways to prepare academic librarians for these new roles. They offer two practitioners’ impressions of the demands and opportunities for librarians to extend their expertise to support RDM, and illustrate how academic librarians have begun doing so through professional association work (through the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL)) and at one academic library (at Drexel University). They urge academic librarians to step out of their comfort zones of organizing, preserving and servicing discovery of information resources and embrace emerging roles for which their values and expertise have prepared them. If librarians ignore these opportunities, they risk being bypassed in efforts to ensure that managing research data and scholarship are central to research protocols.

Focusing on the main research question of what the critical roles and competencies of data curation are in supporting research data life cycle management, this paper adopts a multi-case study method, with data governance frameworks, to analyze stakeholders and data curators, and their competencies, based on different contexts from cases from enterprises and academic libraries in mainland China. Via the context and business analysis on different cases, critical roles such as data supervisor, data steward, and data custodian in guaranteeing data quality and efficiency of data reuse are put forward. Based on the general factor framework summarized via existing literature, suggestions for empowering data curators’ competencies are raised according to the cases. The findings of this paper are as follows: besides digital archiving and preservation, more emphasis should be placed on data governance in the field of data curation. Data curators are closely related but not equivalent to stakeholders of data governance. The different roles of data curators would play their own part in the process of data curation and can be specified as data supervisor, data steward, and data custodian according to given contexts. The roles, competencies, and empowerment strategies presented in this paper might have both theoretical and practical significance for the fields of both data curation and data governance.

The Beibei Public Library (1928–1950) dedicated itself to social education in the rural areas of Chongqing. Examining this library in light of rural reconstruction, this study considers how libraries are affected by the attitudes and behaviors of social elites, officials, government policies, wars, conventional thinking etc. The Beibei Public Library is studied in terms of three aspects: indoor service, itinerant libraries, and additional services. Moreover, this study examines how librarians catered to peasants’ needs, promoted knowledge dissemination, and helped mold new lifestyles in rural China. This case study contributes to research on Chinese rural libraries in the first half of the twentieth century.

Results of an online survey distributed to faculty, PhD students, and researchers throughout Finland in 2016 show that library resources, journal articles, and books are important parts of scholars’ research and work life. The survey was disseminated through FinELib to heads of libraries, who were then asked to distribute it to their academic staff, researchers, and PhD students. The purpose of this study was to examine the value of readings obtained from library collections. To help answer this question, participants were asked about the amount and value of their reading and where they obtained readings, which allowed comparison of how the value of the library collection differs from other sources. The study found that researchers use many ways to identify and obtain articles, and the library collection is identified as one important source. Scholars use the library’s collection mostly to obtain articles for research and those articles help to inspire new ideas. Overall, this study demonstrates the importance of access to scholarly publications for scholars, from the library and elsewhere, such as open access sites and research sharing platforms.