Heather Coates
Digital Scholarship & Data Management Librarian
Indiana University Data Steward for Research Data
http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4290-6997
Abigail Goben
Data Management Librarian and Data Policy Advisor
University of Illinois Chicago
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6520-364
Due to the dispersed nature of the research enterprise across the academic institution, the work of data librarians often involves extensive labor in developing and maintaining relationships with people and offices that engage somewhere in the research lifecycle. This relationship building is influenced by power differentials, political contexts, and the agency of the person to act individually and on behalf of their unit or research team. Navigating these undercurrents requires significant energy and institutional knowledge, as well as emotional intelligence. This includes skills such as self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management, all of which are vital for cultivating needed trust with researchers and establishing the authority and responsibilities of the data librarian across the institution. Perennial maintenance of these relationships is critical to ensuring the smooth transfer of knowledge, developing new connections, supporting researchers, and ensuring funder and publisher compliance. However, it can also be difficult to document in an easily quantifiable mechanism, leading to the perception that the data librarian is “just out having coffee again.”
Data librarianship as connector
The activities of data library services often vary from what is perceived as more traditional academic library engagement — which builds upon instruction, and outreach — and also varies from services provided by research IT — where there is a clear provision of needed infrastructure such as active and long term data storage that serves as a frequent point of engagement for faculty and students. Often without a clear path for researcher accountability, each data librarian or department must identify from a variety of potential services (e.g. data management plans, data curation, software instruction, data governance) and determine what services they can offer to address the gaps between other offices and meet researcher needs. The creation of these services frequently requires the librarians to serve as a bridge between researchers and other services around campus including discipline-focused librarians, IT, data contract offices, and research cores. As many data librarians are the sole individual focused on this work at their institution, this can often result in the librarian also being a tenuous lynchpin in these data-related relationships.
Why does the relationship building matter?
Research institutions are often large and complex, with research support services distributed across multiple service units and encompass dozens of professionals including grants administrators, IRB personnel, general and specialized IT services, and librarians. Additionally, these services may exist at multiple levels within the institution. Researchers may also have access to collaborative regional or national infrastructure funded by federal agencies. Further, researchers working on multi-campus systems or geographically distributed institutions will experience obstacles to meeting in-person. Remote engagement and these dispersed support networks can create a lack of relationships, leading to a gap preventing people from connecting to resources, being up to speed on data policy and requirements, and a lack of awareness of new or established processes. As units reorganize, policies and processes change, and services respond to changing demands, colleagues come back to the data librarian for information, resources, and support as a central connector. Data librarians are both the maintainers and the beneficiaries of these relationships as we learn about emerging research needs, adapt our services to changes in the research support community, and collaboratively construct shared knowledge and resources.
Benefits to the Library and the Data Services Librarian
The relationship building often inherent in data services can have a variety of benefits not only for the individual data librarian but for the library as a whole. Understanding the rapidly shifting data landscape and engaging with the units seeking to support and researchers attempting to navigate it builds community around a shared goal, encouraging people to collaboratively work across service silos to solve problems and cultivate shared awareness and understanding of the roles of each of our units. These relationships establish and strengthen collaborations and create opportunities for future partnerships which may help to buffer against the increased rate of change in higher education, research, and research technologies. These broad engagements also create opportunities for connections with other units of the library, providing a point where the data librarian can connect researchers with peers and further establish library engagement with the institutional research mission.
Relationship Restarts and Maintenance
The data librarian’s relationship network is constantly evolving, and requires extensive maintenance and rebuilding. While we often consider the new and continually evolving relationships with students, who matriculate and graduate on a fairly standard frequency, data services librarians must also contend with the shift in researcher turnover and the changes in staff in departments, colleges, and in other support units around campus. Turnover in these roles may be unexpected and can be impacted by campus budgeting changes, institutional reorganizations, or strategic initiative changes in addition to individuals leaving for new jobs. When such a change occurs, slow hiring processes or new responsibilities for individuals may require re-education, starting over with a team or office, and rebuilding relationships from the ground up. Further, the value of these relationships may seem invisible until changes occur, when the sudden absence of the relationship or expertise reveals the efforts these connections facilitated. Where there is less turnover, relationship maintenance will likely look different, needing to balance regular contact and sharing information to keep colleagues informed without being overwhelmed. All of this relationship identification, building, and maintenance requires time and consistency. The agency of data librarians to devote time to this work may vary depending on their role, library, and institution as well as the agency of their relationship partners. Acknowledging and creating spaces must be varied, to ensure perspectives and expertise from individuals with less agency can contribute.
Navigating Relationship Power Dynamics
Given the potential variety and importance of these relationships, data librarians are likely to navigate power dynamics as they build partnerships across campus. Within the library, data librarians may face challenges both from leadership — who may be ambivalent about providing data services or fearful of demand that exceeds capacity. Beyond the library, data librarians may encounter technological-solutionism (we’ll buy a tool that will fix everything), overwhelm, apathy, or benign neglect, requiring all of the relationship development and maintenance to fall upon the librarian. These power dynamics are often exacerbated by the stereotyped feminized perception of librarians; the limited resources available to the data librarian (e.g. we usually don’t provide active or preservation storage); and our limited role in compliance. This puts the data librarian in a constant position of needing to wield soft relational power (“We are here to help”). While opportunities such as the NIH data management and sharing policy can create opportunities for engagement, promoting sustained engagement can be challenging. Person-to-person connections are both powerful and tenuous. There is constant demand for the relationship to remain relevant as new demands are identified. The work of maintaining these connections is also invisible, under-valued, and subject to the whims of leadership and their priorities.
A lack of support from library leadership can sometimes be overcome by investing in grassroots efforts, particularly with other research support units. While grassroots can mean different things, the cornerstone is a common goal. When library leadership fails to recognize the value and importance of this work, building social capital and demonstrating success beyond the library can produce positive peer pressure within the library and increase the relational power for all. While grassroots efforts are time-consuming and may be slowed down by coming to agreement on shared goals, the benefits include space for peers to directly name and confront the obstacles faced by researchers instead of navigating territorial battles. When done well, it can provide a space for peers to honestly describe the socio-cultural obstacles and move beyond technological solutions for research data management and sharing. Successful grassroots approaches are sometimes formalized as new services or units; in other cases, the continued existence of a grassroots group with adoption of their outputs is a successful outcome. On a relational level, grassroots efforts can provide community to individuals whose colleagues are engaged in very different work.
Relationship Assessment
In addition to both having the knowledge and skill sets and building and maintaining the relationships, the current academic focus of documentation and productivity metrics mean that data librarians are likely to need ways to quantify the messy work of relationship building. Some things are easily counted: consultations, instructions, website or LibGuide views and click-throughs. Metrics that capture referrals or work done to prevent data loss, misuse, or harm will continue to be nebulous. At a certain point, the assessment of the connections a data librarian has made may need to consider the percentage of saturation and strength of relationships rather than a focus on increasing connections year-to-year. However, it is also useful to identify that the scope of data librarianship work and measures of success include community building, which impacts not only short-term outreach but long-term data culture improvement for teams, departments, schools, and colleges. It also contributes to the creation of more robust and practical guidance that reflects the complex reality of academic research.
Closing
The labor of relationship building and maintenance is inherent in data librarianship, providing ways for us to bridge the gaps between research support units, researchers, peers in the library, IT, and beyond. It is essential that we make visible the ongoing benefit of these relationships, including the time and effort necessary to ensure that these connections are established, ongoing, or rebuilt in the continuously changing landscape of the institution. In acknowledging the benefits and opportunities created by cultivating strong relationships, we hope to shift the perception both internally and externally from “oh, she’s just having coffee with someone” to understanding the value in supporting the institutional research enterprise.
