[Rdap] Data management and public services

Gulliford, Bradley gulliford at uta.edu
Wed Nov 12 10:18:54 EST 2014


I was shocked to hear of criticism of Daureen who is one of the leaders of our field.  My whole professional life has been frustrated by public services librarians who think that there is nothing more to information service than reference/liaison work.  I, too, have the problem of colleagues not understanding what I do.  As a result of a reorg, we have a librarian in charge of staff development, and she asked me to design a curriculum of presentations, Web pages, wikis, or whatever I come up with to acquaint staff with data curation, and help them feel more confident about explaining it to their patrons and recognizing opportunities for the library (me) to come in and archive their data or introduce them to available data sets-what Daureen has just posted about.

This wouldn't help in a review going on right now, but maybe it would help to point out that you have engendered interest or discussion among your colleagues worldwide.  :-{)}

Brad Gulliford
Data Management and Curation
University of Texas at Arlington Library
Arlington, Texas, USA



From: Rdap [mailto:rdap-bounces at asis.org] On Behalf Of Eaker, Chris
Sent: Wednesday, November 12, 2014 7:30 AM
To: Research Data, Access and Preservation
Subject: Re: [Rdap] Data management and public services

Hi Daureen,

I have run into a similar problem. Though my colleagues weren't critical of my data curation work, I was told that during my retention review discussion, they focused mainly on my liaison work in my subject area (Architecture, which is a minor portion of my job) and discussed the major part, data curation, very little. The reason, according to my supervisor, was because they didn't know enough about it, so they didn't know how to assess it for merit. My goal over this next year is to better educate my colleagues on what I do in that area so they know how to assess it in future reviews. That might be your issue or it might not, but it wouldn't hurt to make a concerted effort to help your colleagues better understand what it is that you do. I believe that work is as much a public service as is working the reference desk, it's just more specialized. Maybe criticism is a reaction to feeling like they don't understand it.

Best regards,
Christopher B. Eaker
Assistant Professor and Data Curation Librarian
College of Architecture and Design Liaison
University of Tennessee Libraries
John C. Hodges Library, Room 236
chris at utk.edu<mailto:chris at utk.edu>
(865) 974-4404
________________________________
From: Rdap [rdap-bounces at asis.org] on behalf of Daureen Nesdill [daureen.nesdill at utah.edu]
Sent: Tuesday, November 11, 2014 2:30 PM
To: Research Data, Access and Preservation
Subject: [Rdap] Data management and public services
Hi,
I'm up for my 5-yr post tenure review and a colleague of mine is being critical of my work in data management. This is  because, as she explains, it is not public service so I do not do enough public service. What I'm doing is assisting with writing DMPs, teaching about repositories and data management, answering reference questions in data management - in addition to all the ELN work.

Has anyone run into this issue? How did you handle it?

Totally confused in Utah,
Daureen

Daureen Nesdill, MS, MLIS
Data Curation Librarian
The Faculty Center @ the J. W. Marriott Library
University of Utah
295 South 1500 East
Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0860
801-585-5975
daureen.nesdill at utah.edu<mailto:daureen.nesdill at utah.edu>

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