Data Management Outreach to Junior Faculty Members: A Case Study

Data Management Outreach to Junior Faculty Members: A Case Study. Megan Sapp Nelson. Journal of eScience Librarianship. August 21, 2015.
     Data management is generally not addressed with new career faculty and it is either over looked or assumed that these faculty will figure it out on their own. A brownbag and workshop outreach program was developed and presented junior faculty early in their career to introduce them to potential issues and solutions of data management. This gave them an opportunity to brainstorm with more experienced faculty members. Objectives for the workshop included that the Faculty will:

• Evaluate the current state of their data management practices.
• Develop a prioritized list of actions that can be put into place.
• Understand how those actions can be transmitted to a research group.

The case study and additional files are available at this link. Graduate students have a different perspective from the faculty.  Graduate students should:

• Focus on mechanics over deeper understanding of concepts.
• Learn data management from faculty within the context of an immediate
• problem and therefore don’t necessarily get broad training in the full lifecycle of data management.
• Figure out data management on their own, and figure it out differently from everyone else in the lab unless a protocol is put in place.
• Have a wide spectrum of expertise.
• Frequently suggest and adopt the data analysis tools used in labs which leads to fragmented data management for the professor over time.

The key to the success of the workshop was to involve the junior faculty peer group along with their mentor faculty members. This new tool was useful in addition to the The Data Curation Profile tool.

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