26. Evolving Data Ecosystem at an Academic Library

In this world where the lake of available data is becoming an ocean, libraries need to support their researchers as they navigate government mandates and the future of data. At our library, we decided it was crucial to increase our data services to better support researchers as they meet funder requirements, delve into open science, and improve data skills. This poster will depict the data service ecosystem we created, showcasing how pre-existing support, new services, and our goals for the future come together to create a web that supports the entire data lifecycle. 

In previous years, our data services focused on offering support in bibliometrics, open scholarship, and geospatial data. In the past year, we have expanded by creating a new data management and sharing support service and introducing new workshop offerings. These workshops range in topics from reproducibility, to metadata, AI, ArcGIS and mapping, and funder policies, culminating with a successful series on data visualizations. Finally, we supported our researchers with new software – launching a data and institutional repository and purchasing and supporting an electronic laboratory notebook. 

Our plan is to continue this momentum by expanding our data team with two inaugural positions, reproducibility librarian and data curator. This will help us offer tailored learning opportunities, design materials that cater to changing funder requirements, and explore additional research/data platforms. We are also building on partnerships with units across campus that work in synergistic areas including groups that specialize in graduate education, research, and open scholarship. This strategy includes bolstering our marketing efforts and increasing the visibility of our services. In addition, AI and machine learning are closely related to data, and we have a working group devising an AI recommendation for libraries.  

This poster will depict our data ecosystem, highlighting our current progress, upcoming initiatives, and future aspirations.