An Integrated Data Management Plan Instructional Program

Much has been written about researcher's data management and data sharing practices and needs. The published studies show that researchers have an awareness of the data sharing mandates and policies of federal grant agencies and journal publishers and there is a growing acceptance of the intrinsic value of data sharing albeit with some concerns and caveats. However, establishing an effective and consistent data management service presents challenges for libraries, given the known disciplinary differences in data management needs and the fact that faculty have not yet significantly changed their data management practices to conform to federal agency and publisher mandates. After conducting in-depth interviews with twenty-one engineering and atmospheric science faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, it became clear that scientists and engineers view the research lifecycle as a holistic endeavor and treat data as one of many necessary elements in the scholarly communication workflow. The generation, usage, storage, and sharing of data are part of the integrated scholarly workflow, and are not necessarily wholly separate processes. Building on these interviews, the authors have developed an instructional and training program that better focuses on integrating data management activities focusing on research and scholarly communication processes. The goal of our project was to examine data management practices in the context of researcher scholarly workflow needs and behaviors and develop and implement an instructional program that addresses researcher data needs. The development and assessment of this program is underway.