From Survey to Social Network: Building New Services through Connections

Still relatively new at many educational institutions, Digital Scholarship and Data Services Librarian positions frequently require the appointees to find novel ways of expanding current services and exploring new initiatives. To better understand the needs of our institution, we initiated two information gathering processes involving faculty, our key stakeholders. We will share what we learned as we developed and conducted our 2017 digital scholarship needs assessment survey, which preceded 24 in-depth interviews with faculty members, and the larger trends that emerged from the survey as well as the themes uncovered by the interview process. Each of these research strategies made a distinct contribution to our understanding of the services needed, and proved to be useful tools as we tried to simultaneously develop a network and understand the faculty culture at DePaul. Although every institution’s context is unique, both methods of collecting information provided insights which should be helpful in a variety of contexts.