Uniting Networks: LIBER and RDA Europe Advancing Research Together

Four questions were posed to the participants around the topics of tools/practices, skills development, digital/traditional collections, and the FAIR & CARE principles. Respectively, these were: 

We divided the participants into two groups, each focusing on one of the questions above for approximately 10-12 minutes.

On the questions, ‘What are your current data management tools and practices? Do you have a wishlist?’, our participants’ responses indicated the variety of tools, practices and research administration systems in use, from DMP OPIDoR, CRIS systems, and simple spreadsheets. What was common here was a recognition of the value of having established practices in place and the tools to support these; this was reflected in the discussions around how RDA Europe and LIBER could support these efforts, where recommended tools, guidelines and the sharing of best practices came up in a variety of responses. 

For the topic of skills development, we posed a few questions to do with the management, support, and funding for these efforts. The main takeaway here was a common concern with the idea of self-guided or self-motivated training for people working in libraries. Most participants noted that there was space for skills development allotted to them in their roles but that it was often self-directed and lacked centralised coordination, leading potentially to a lower uptake than was desirable. Internal or in-house skills development courses were common; when it came to external ones participants noted that in some cases it was difficult to identify which course(s) were of sufficient quality. Suggestions of how RDA and/or LIBER could respond to these concerns included the creation of a guide of self-teaching resources for those working in libraries (such as the Digital Scholarship & Data Science Topic Guides that was announced at the conference), guidelines for strengthening the recognition and support for librarian training needs, and advocating for policy changes to recognise librarian competencies and their needs. 

The questions posed on the topic of digital collections – What are the current or planned collaborations/activities taking place between research data and traditional library holdings? What types of barriers do you see here? – provoked more equivocal responses. The focus was mainly on ongoing (or planned) efforts to digitise existing ‘traditional’ (i.e., paper) collections and aligning the management practices for these and ‘born digital’ materials. Again, the issue of training and skills development in connection with these types of activities was raised, with participants suggesting roles for both LIBER and RDA Europe here. 

The efforts to embed the FAIR and CARE principles was the subject of the final question to participants. The discussions these questions prompted focused on both the day-to-day, practical efforts to provide support for researchers and some shared concerns across participants’ institutions. On the former, participants spoke about how to engage with researchers via hosting informal coffee meetings to introduce FAIR and CARE to researchers, and how requests for support from researchers often focused on things like DMP templates, how to select and apply data licences, and how checklists and decision trees could be used to aid researchers; on the latter, the discussions touched on a comparison of institutions with respect to support from director levels, the extent to which local data management policies address FAIR and CARE, the implementation of a research data support office, and issues with raising awareness among researchers of the support available to them via libraries. An additional point to note here is that awareness of the CARE principles and how to implement them was lower among the participants as compared to the FAIR principles. Again, the roles of RDA and LIBER here were to do with facilitating connections across organisations and being a source of success stories and good practices.