For the past few weeks, we have presented several statistics on our blog. Now, we at DMPTool are interested to know which use statistics you’d like to see next.

The IMLS Project Poster, presented during the Sunday evening and described with a number of emphatic gestures (as seen here).

The DataONE Users Group meeting in Chapel Hill, North Carolina just concluded, with representatives from data authors, institution support staff, data repositories and aggregators, and other stakeholders in attendance. The DataONE Users Group meeting provides a space for those in attendance to help guide DataONE’s initiatives to better meet their needs. This was a great opportunity to highlight the DMPTool development plans over the coming months, as well as the work we’re doing to provide librarians with high-impact resources for data management support.

The feedback we received with regards to the DMPTool was both extremely positive and useful. As the first step in the data management lifecycle, the DMPTool as a planning aid also serves as an excellent entry point for researchers to be made aware of the resources available at their institution. Arming librarians not only with educational resources such as our webinar series and upcoming promotional materials, but also examples of how others in their field have been active in data services is an effective way to fill the leadership gap in data management.

Several attendees mentioned that one of the key problems facing researchers is a lack of knowledge about data management requirements, best practices, and the support resources available through their institution. Whether its funder requirements, guidance on choosing one or more data repositories, or even the proper language to describe a data management plan, providing knowledge support to researchers during the grant writing period is a great way to demonstrate the librarian’s support role during operational implementation.

As we take this new feedback into account, we’ll continue to assemble useful resources not only for data management, but also DMPTool administration. If you weren’t able to make it out to the DUG meeting this year, the presentations are available at the DataONE User Group page. Feel free to drop us a line at uc3@ucop.edu or email me directly at daniel.phipps@ucop.edu – we’re always interested in new ways that the DMPTool can support the research community.

The poster we presented at the meeting is available on figshare: DOI 10.6084/m9.figshare.730643

The Association of Research Libraries is a nonprofit organization of 125 research libraries at comprehensive, research-extensive institutions in the US and Canada that share similar research missions, aspirations, and achievements.

DID YOU KNOW…?

• 46% of all ARL institutions are current partners of the DMPTool.
• 50% of all researchers on DMPTool to date are from ARL institutions.

Update: July 22, 2013: With the recent addition of five institutions, half (50%) of all 125 ARL institutions are now members of DMPTool!

On June 18th we gave a webinar on customizing the DMPTool for your institution. While the recording and slides from that presentation can be found on the webinar series page, here’s a brief review of the major topics that were covered.

What Do We Mean by Customization?

The DMPTool comes pre-populated with funder-provided information on how to construct a data management plan. Customizing the tool gives you a chance to modify what grant writers see when using the tool. Broken up into separate sections, administrators can provide help text, suggested answers, contacts at the institution, and resource links such as best practices guides or support groups.

The DMPTool’s audience includes students, researchers, and grant writers. Source: wikimedia commons

Customizing the DMPTool for your users can accomplish two goals. First, by setting up authentication and linking to resources and people from your institution, it encourages confidence in users. There are a lot of resources out there, so researchers will be looking for familiar signs. Second, you can ensure that your researchers are being connected to reliable, up-to-date information.

How to Customize

There are three steps to the customization process. Step one is to set up Shibboleth Authentication. Shibboleth is an open source software package used by many universities to provide a single login for multiple services. This can be extended to work with the DMPTool, to allow researchers to use the same login as other tools at their institution. Shibboleth is not required for customization, but without it researchers have to create their own account which can be a barrier to access. More information on how to set up shibboleth with DMPTool can be found at our website.

The second step is the customization documentation itself. This is where you provide information about your institution, and specific advice for each funder. These documents can be found at the Templates for Institutional Customization page on our bitbucket wiki. The institution settings document lets you select the email address where help requests should be sent as well as resource links that are relevant for each step in the process.

The 5 columns of the Funder Template, and the Information they need

We break up the other documents by funding agency to give you as much control as possible with your customization. Each document is broken up into different sections, and lets you provide resource links relevant to that question, a suggested answer, and help text.

Once these documents are filled out, you can attach them to an email and send them to uc3@ucop.edu for submission. We’ll populate the fields with the information you provide, and add your institution to the dropdown list at the DMPTool website.

For More Information…

We’ve started an Example Documentation page where institutions can share how they’ve used DMPTool customization. This is a great place to start if you want to see how others have customized the DMPTool.

For a more in-depth breakdown of how to customize the tool, as well how we’re working to provide more administrative control in future versions of the DMPTool, check out the full webinar. If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to email me at daniel.phipps@ucop.edu or uc3@ucop.edu.

We have determined the top-ranked institutions that use the DMPTool based on the number of users and of plans they create (October 2011 – Present).

Top 10 Institutions by Number of Users:

The following institutions have produced the most number of users on DMPTool.

Top 10 Institutions by Number of Plans:

The following institutions have produced the most data management plans using DMPTool.

Congratulations to the eight institutions that made both lists: North Carolina State University, Stanford University, UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UCLA, UC San Diego, University of Illinois, and University of Virginia.

Source: WikiMedia Commons

As a library, taking on an increased support role for data management is a long-term project that involves coordinating with groups institution-wide. Environmental scan interviews are a vital first step. They can help you find advocates in other departments, and find trouble on the horizon. We’ll be discussing how to perform an environmental scan in our webinar series this summer, but there are steps you can take within your library to begin the process. The first task at hand is to identify your own library’s existing services.

The library self-assessment is a critical first step to developing an environmental scan. Before speaking with the other technical or research support groups at your institution, you should have a written list of the services, initiatives, and plans that your library has undertaken.

What are you looking for?

The purpose of assembling this written list is to inform your later interviews and to help you focus on you institution’s priorities. In an ideal world, a thorough survey of library patrons and the services they need from the library would not only give you insight into how you focus your activities, but also give you ammunition when speaking to other departments about the importance of library data services. In the short term, speaking to your fellow librarians (especially reference, research, or subject specialists) about their interactions with researchers can give you a quick-and-dirty overview of where to focus your efforts. Looking at other university libguides on data services can also give you an idea of things researchers find useful.

Interviewing your Library’s Director

The other half of the internal review is the top-down approach. Taking what you’ve learned about the current state of affairs, meeting with your library director can give you broader, long term goals. Other, more detailed guides on how to conduct informative interviews exist, but broadly it’s useful to approach the interview with a pre-established set of goals for information you want to leave with, an understanding of how formal/detailed the interview will be, and a list of questions to ask. This should give you a wider-scale view of your Library’s data services work, and how it fits in with the campus’ larger scale priorities. You may also walk away with a better understanding of other groups on campus with a stake in data management for later use, as well as the internal organization of your own library.

Review, Recycle, Remix

While a self-assessment is the first step to developing an environmental scan of the whole institution, it also stands alone as a short-term thing librarians can do to start working on their own data practices. Before rushing off to coordinate with researchers, grant writing offices, or IT make sure you take the time to review the information you’re getting from your patrons, fellow librarians, and other staff. Giving yourself some weeks to digest this information will give you a better idea of what you can do in-house, what tasks require outside collaboration, and what might be out-of-scope for now.

For more on environmental scanning and other important aspects of data services at your library, keep an eye on our webinar page over the coming months.