From Questions To Toolkit: Assessing Instrument and Facility Pids Knowledge At Academic Institutions

The NSF-funded FAIROS research coordination network on FAIR facilities and instruments has been working since 2023 to "advance the standardization and adoption of Persistent Identifiers (PIDs) for research facilities and instruments nationally." As part of this effort, the project PIs held a series of workshops to facilitate discussion among and solicit feedback from relevant stakeholders, including academic data librarians. After participating in these workshops, a small team of librarians came together to consider how the FAIROS RCN recommendations would impact their institutional communities and what role the libraries could play in enhancing PID literacy and accelerating use. Our group was especially interested in factors inhibiting PID use and local resource investments required for implementing or improving uptake of PIDs for instruments and facilities.

To address these questions, we designed surveys for our research community. Our group’s goal is to develop and effectively target outreach and education about PID creation and use, tailored to the needs of various departments. We realized that it would be more efficient to have two versions of the surveys – a “Researcher survey” for employees involved in research utilizing various instruments and potentially publishing their works, and a “Maintainer survey” for employees managing the instruments in labs and facilities. These surveys, along with documentation for outreach are compiled in the “PIDs Toolkit”, which can be adapted by librarians and data professionals at other institutions who want to implement a similar survey locally. Our team will conduct these surveys at our respective institutions in Spring of 2026. The aggregated responses and analysis will be included in the toolkit as a baseline for comparison. In this presentation, we will share the process of creating the surveys, preliminary analysis results, and recommendations for PIDs outreach at academic institutions.