Improving data management services for researchers at the University of Tartu Library through adopting RDA recommendations
The University of Tartu (UT) is a classical university, located in the South-Eastern part of Estonia, founded in 1632. The University of Tartu belongs to the top 1.2% of the world’s best universities. At the moment, there are more than 13 thousand students (12% international students, 39% master’s and doctoral students) and 3000 employees (51% academic staff of which 186 are professors and 14% are international teaching and research staff members). The University of Tartu Library is one of the few Estonian academic libraries which is actively offering RDM services to researchers. This work was started more than 10 years ago by introducing Open Access, followed by advocating Open Science.
Our biggest challenge has been finding ways to increase and offer more complex RDM services outside the University of Tartu by involving other Estonian research libraries. We saw that one possible approach to solving this problem was the adoption of RDA’s “23 Things: Libraries for Research Data”.
| Country of the organisation | Estonia |
| WG the adoption story relates to: | Libraries for Research Data IG |
| Stakeholder Classification of the adopting organisation: | Library |
| Impact of the adoption: | 23 Things helped us to systematize and analyze the knowledge we have already acquired and to identify the still existing gaps. We were surprised to see that libraries have no clear idea about how and with which results the basic data literacy is taught to students and researchers at their universities. |
| RDA ouput(s) adopted: | The University of Tartu Library officially adopted RDA’s “23 Things: Libraries for Research Data (Supporting Output)” in September 2020; however, we have been offering most of the services described in this recommendation on different levels already for many years. |