IDEA: Improving Data Engagement and Advocacy

That's a wrap on season three of IDEA! As in seasons past, we're celebrating with our interviewees one final time as we ask them a new set of data management questions:If your role in research data management had a motto, what would it be?What’s the most creative solution you’ve seen to encourage researchers to embrace data management?If you could host a workshop on one exciting aspect of data management, what would the focus be?As always, a big thank you to our guests this season: Kristin Briney, Carla Strubbia, Alessandra Soro, Matt Mayernik, Andrew Johnson, Claudius Mundoma, and Amber Gallant.We couldn't do it without you!

In this episode, we’re thrilled to welcome Amber Gallant, Data Services Librarian at Royal Roads University, who will be sharing with us details about her innovative project, Byte-Sized Data Encounters. Amber was faced with the challenge of teaching doctoral students with limited time and the unique needs of a largely online program adoptable data management skills and she adopted an extremely creative approach. She used a micro-education approach which reimagined traditional training by weaving in short, engaging, and hands-on activities to spark curiosity, promote practical learning, empower doctoral students with data management skills, and make the material memorable. Together, we’ll explore how this informal, scaffolded model builds confidence and helps students develop data practices.Amber Gallant is the Data Services Librarian at Royal Roads University. She is interested in data equity and accessibility issues, data justice (or, examining how people are fairly or unfairly represented as a result of their production of data!), data reuse, and exploring sources of secondary data. She brings this work to RRU in discussing data collection and methodologies, among other topics, with faculty and students conducting research. Outside work, she enjoys baking overly complicated desserts, attempting to sample every cheese known to humanity, and exploring the beautiful, unceded lands stewarded to this day by the Lekwungen-speaking peoples.Resources Mentioned: Byte-Sized Data Encounters OSF project: 10.17605/OSF.IO/K46C5

Today, we will be reporting on Researcher Challenges and Experiences with Data Services, published March 27, 2025, by Chelsea McCracken and Ruby MacDougall with ITHAKA S+R. ITHAKA S+R has worked with 29 US and Canadian institutions over the past 2 years to gather relevant information to improve the coordination of research data services. The project has conducted a landscape survey of data service offerings and conducted interviews with researchers to explore practices and experiences with research data services. This report which highlights the results from the semi-structured interview portion of this research, exploring their practices and experiences using research data services.Article citation: McCracken, Chelsea, and Ruby MacDougall. "Researcher Challenges and Experiences with Data Services." Ithaka S+R. Ithaka S+R. 27 March 2025. Web. 18 June 2025. https://doi.org/10.18665/sr.322388

In this episode, we’re diving into a topic that’s gaining momentum across the research data community—assigning persistent identifiers, or PIDs, to instruments and facilities. As the research ecosystem continues to push toward greater transparency, reproducibility, and FAIR practices, recognizing the role of the tools and spaces where research happens has become increasingly important. But assigning PIDs to instruments and facilities isn’t just about metadata—it’s about creating connections across systems, surfacing valuable research infrastructure, and ensuring proper attribution. Today, we’re speaking with three representatives from the NSF-funded FAIR Instruments and Facilities Research Coordination Network, Matthew Mayernik, Andrew Johnson, and Claudius Mundoma to hear insights from their FAIR facilities and instruments recent workshops, and explore how data professionals can serve as connectors and translators across stakeholder groups. Matt Mayernik is a Project Scientist and Deputy Library Director at the NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research. His work is focused on research and service development related to scientific data curation and digital scholarship topics, including persistent identifiers, metadata, and institutional repositories. He is also the Editor-in-Chief of the Data Science Journal.Andrew Johnson is Associate Faculty Director for Data and Scholarly Communication Services in the University Libraries and Initiative Director for Research Data Management and Repositories in the Center for Research Data and Digital Scholarship at the University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder). His work includes overseeing research data management and curation efforts, open access publishing initiatives, and overall strategy for the CU Scholar open access repository. His research interests focus on emerging services and infrastructure for research data management and curation, open access publishing, and open science, particularly with regard to interdisciplinary and highly collaborative research. Johnson is Principal Investigator for the CU Boulder award that is part of the FAIR Facilities and Instruments collaborative NSF FAIR Open Science Research Coordination Network (FAIROS RCN) project.Claudius Mundoma is the Director of Shared Instrumentation Facilities in the Office of Vice Provost and Dean of Research at Stanford University. He leads the strategy implementation and evaluation of the Shared Research Platforms initiative as well as oversee planning of future activities that elevate Stanford's shared facilities to the next level. Among many core duties, - collaborate with shared facilities leadership to address strategic and operational issues that impact the community, and support development of new services to advance Stanford’s research and education missions. Previously, led the Core Facilities and Shared Instrumentation team as the inaugural Director in the Research and Innovation at the University of Colorado Boulder. Before that, directed the Physical Biochemistry Facility in the Institute of Molecular Biophysics at Florida State University for nearly two decades.Resources Mentioned:https://ncar.github.io/FAIR-Facilities-Instruments/“Persistent Identifiers for Instruments and Facilities: Current State, Challenges, and Opportunities.” Journal of eScience Librarianship 13 (3): e964. https://doi.org/10.7191/jeslib.964.

In this episode, Briana and Shannon discuss an article that shares a novel development in the research data management engagement and support space - an AI virtual consultant designed by researchers at the University of Mannheim to address the persistent challenges researchers face in implementing FAIR data principles. This represents a groundbreaking approach to simplifying complex data management processes through AI-driven assistance.Article citation: Shigapov, Renat, and Irene Schumm. "FAIR GPT: A virtual consultant for research data management in ChatGPT." arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.07108 (2024).

Data professionals often ask themselves: how can we make research data literacy and data management training more engaging, interactive, and fun? In this episode, we explore two highly innovative and creative approaches designed to enhance understanding and transform how researchers interact with key concepts in research data and data management.  Alessandra Soro (she/her) is a Community Manager working at 4TU.ResearchData: the community for research data and software professionals at the four technical universities in The Netherlands. Over the past few years, Alessandra has been involved in the development of various communities, such as the Community Managers Club and Queer Planet (a community for queer internationals in The Netherlands). With a background in strategic communication, she develops games, initiatives, and art-related projects to connect people with meaningful (but unattractive) topics, such as data interoperability and civil rights. Alessandra has a creative approach to community building and is passionate about co-creating with members, as she believes that bringing different perspectives is the key to meaningful projects. Carla Strubbia (PhD) has a background in health science and a strong interest in open science, health information technology, research data management and responsible AI. She specializes in the use of personal and qualitative data in research, drawing from her expertise in RDM best practices. She is passionate about creating engaging resources for researchers, support staff, and PhD candidates, fostering collaboration between participants and experts, and building meaningful networks. Carla’s work combines innovative approaches, such as the Data Hunters project, with critical reflection on design principles for online learning environments. Resources Mentioned: Data Hunters Card Game: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14713229 4TU.ResearchData repository: https://data.4tu.nl/ Nexum; data 4 art project: https://nexumdata4art.com/

In open science, universities are key to fostering adoption of best practices and can encourage these best practices through academic evaluation processes. Promotion and tenure committees are one of these processes. Committees often have the capability to evaluate articles and books, but assessing data and software is a recent development for which there are few guidelines.  In this episode, Shannon and Briana go through ten proposed simple rules for recognizing data and software contributions. Article citation: Puebla I, Ascoli GA, Blume J, Chodacki J, Finnell J, Kennedy DN, et al. (2024) Ten simple rules for recognizing data and software contributions in hiring, promotion, and tenure. PLoS Comput Biol 20(8): e1012296. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1012296

To kick off the season, we're excited to highlight a new resource designed to help researchers strengthen their data management practices. We're speaking with Kristin Briney, the creator of the Research Data Management Workbook—a practical tool packed with hands-on exercises that guide researchers through key phases of the data lifecycle. We’ll explore the workbook's unique exercises and how researchers can use them to build their research skills as well as how data stewards can use the exercises to more efficiently and effectively support researchers. Also included is our sidebar on the upcoming accessibility requirements for data here in the USA. Kristin Briney is the Biology & Biological Engineering Librarian at the California Institute of Technology and author of the books “Data Management for Researchers” (Pelagic Publishing, 2015), “Managing Data for Patron Privacy” (ALA Editions, 2022) with Becky Yoose, and “The Research Data Management Workbook” (Caltech Library, 2023). She has a PhD in chemistry and an MLIS, both from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research focuses on research data management, institutional data policy, and patron privacy with respect to library data handling. Kristin is an advocate for the adoption of the international date standard ISO 8601 (YYYY-MM-DD) and likes to spend her free time making data visualizations out of yarn. Resources Mentioned: Online edition of the Workbook: https://caltechlibrary.github.io/RDMworkbook/ Downloadable edition of the Workbook: https://doi.org/10.7907/z6czh-7zx60 Americans with Disabilities Act Title II Regulations: https://www.ada.gov/law-and-regs/regulations/title-ii-2010-regulations/ Fact Sheet: New Rule on the Accessibility of Web Content and Mobile Apps Provided by State and Local Governments: https://www.ada.gov/resources/2024-03-08-web-rule/

As season 2 of IDEA comes to a close, join us in hearing one last time from our interviewees as we ask all of them a new set of research data management themed questions. How do you measure the success of a researcher engagement activity? What do you think the next big trend in research data management is? What is your favorite form of researcher engagement and why? An episode a year in the making! A big thank you to our guests this season: James Edson, Jeffrey Glatstein, Craig Risien, Erin Barker, Michael Hofmockel, Thomas Serrano, Monika Bargmann, Michael Feichtinger, Emily J. Kate, and Daria Orlowska We'll see you all next season!

The Collections as Data initiative aims to expand the uses of archival data collections by making them more accessible, particularly in forms ready for computationally driven research and teaching. This initiative makes the data from these collections available so that researchers and the public can engage with them. In this episode, we have the pleasure of speaking with Daria Orlowska, Data Librarian at Western Michigan University, about her collections as data work where she not only worked with others to develop structured datasets from historical records, but also leveraged this collection to create data literacy curriculum. Daria Orlowska is a data librarian and assistant professor at Western Michigan University. As a former behavioral sciences research assistant, she bases her data education on first-hand experience with the frustration of managing data. In her current position, Daria advises on data management plans, creates data education resources and experiential workshop, provides consultations on data management, finding secondary data, and data project workflows, and advocates for researcher data needs. In addition, she helps curate datasets from archival collections that serve as data literacy teaching tools for college undergraduates and K-12 students alike. She holds an MSLIS from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. You can find all three lessons on OSF:- Third grade lesson: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/F5HRA - Eighth grade lesson: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/5BH92 - Undergraduate lesson: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/PHZNK The lessons are licensed under CC0, with the hope that others will adapt, remix, or reuse them. When work on the new Michigan Memories portal completes (https://michmemories.org/), we hope to see them there as well.We used the Record of passing vessels at the South Haven light-station from 1878-1882 log as a basis for all three of our lessons. The original scanned primary source can be found in Western Michigan University's online collection (https://luna.library.wmich.edu/luna/servlet/detail/WMUwmu~90~90~1246014~154475:Record-of-passing-vessels-at-the-So). A transcribed version of this document can be found within Zenodo (https://zenodo.org/records/8044702).