Engaging Librarians in Research Data Management: approaches & lessons learned
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Huggard, Simon
Simon Huggard (Digital Infrastructure Manager, Library, La Trobe University) will explore the approach the La Trobe University Library is taking in creating new research support initiatives and reflect on how library staff have immersed themselves in the world of data management, enabling a dialogue between researchers and the Library. As awareness increases of the role librarians can play in providing support and advice for research data management, so does the need to provide library staff with professional development opportunities. This webinar explores approaches to engaging librarians in the growing area of research data management, reflecting on different approaches and lessons learned.
 So what I would like to cover is some of the things we have been doing at La Trobe for a couple of years in training up research, librarians in research data management and sort of where we have come from and where we are going to. So I would just like to acknowledge that this presentation is sort of an adaptation of one we did at the e-research conference last year in Melbourne and that was done with Kerry Sullivan and Aminah Nichols-Boyd as well. This is sort of an update of where we have come from and where we are going to. Just I guess about La Trobe, we have this wonderful statue in our Bandura campus, our Melbourne campus by the sculptor Charles Robb, which really sort of gives an indication of what we are going to cover today. And I guess what I will do is I will also talk a little bit about La Trobe if people don't know that we were established in 1964 and we opened in 1967. We have about 30,000 students and we are across five different campuses across the state of Victoria and today I am at our wonderful Aubrey-Wedonga campus and we have other regional campuses in Victoria and our main campus in Melbourne where the bulk of our students are. I guess the metaphor here is that this sculpture is about universities turning ideas on their heads and I guess our journey with our librarians learning about research data management for them is really turning them on their heads and thinking differently about the work that they do and how they support researchers. And so I guess what we were coming from was a situation where we had librarians who were supporting teaching and learning and research and doing their usual what we called faculty librarian work and then coming in into the more technical area of the library which was the digital infrastructure area last year and the year before in terms of looking at the repository and research data management and more technical aspects of that work and discovering what was being done there and how they could then advocate for that and talk to researchers and support their needs. And so I guess the other metaphor for the statue on its head is and the statues of Governor Charles La Trobe actually I should say also in case you didn't notice. The other metaphor is that the university has really turned itself on its head after a big restructure last year. So that's been a really big change for the university and the library is positioning itself to help with that. So what we've been what the university has been talking about is it's a future ready agenda. So we've been looking at it's the strategic plan and the research plan which is has a really strong emphasis on supporting researchers and really making sure that they're productive and that their research is well known and well described that we really help them promote that research and that we position ourselves to really help them in terms of their what their outputs are and in order for people to be productive to also I guess improve La Trobe's situation in terms of how its research is known and what its international ranking is and the income it gets from research and all those kind of areas. And so that restructure of the university which has gone across the whole university has really had a big impact on the library as well as I said. So the library really has put itself in place to really work with researchers and do as much as they can to help them. This is the size of our population that La Trobe and where we're not a hugely research intensive university but we still do a lot of research and we have a lot of people to support so we see that as a really important thing for the library to support researchers and we've really done a lot to make sure we can do that. So I guess the new areas for our future ready agenda for the university were the five research focus areas which are listed there and also the different disciplinary research programs and so being able to engage with those different areas and really support them is seen as a change for the library. It's not just about supporting a particular faculty or a particular school. It's really supporting researchers who are doing big projects across multi-disciplinary areas and partnerships with other institutions and research income and all those kind of things. So they're really important. What our approach was in the last couple of years, so 2013 to 2014, initially we had, so as I mentioned before, we had a digital infrastructure team who were responsible for our repository, the ANTS projects we'd done up until then in research data management as well as other areas for the library but in terms of research data management it was the focus on the repository and publishing data through the repository and it was just done within that digital infrastructure team and all the work we'd done on ANTS projects, we had a, you know, we'd done a couple of different ANTS projects to publish our data through the repository and publish to research data Australia. They were really focused on just the team in digital infrastructure working on that and only involving other people from time to time. So it was really done as a separate, very technical work, advocacy going out and talking to academics but it really contained within that area and we felt that it was time to really change that. It was recognised in early 2013 that we needed to change that and get faculty librarians to really engage with that work and train them up and get them up to speed because we saw that that was the future, it was a really important thing for them to advocate for that work that was being done. So we had, initially had two faculty librarians who commenced in our area in digital infrastructure. They were in there for an eight week period for one day a week and two librarians came in and really we trained them up initially in what we were doing in the digital infrastructure area. So I'll cover what that was a little bit later and then what we thought was then how do we, you know, is that a good model? We sort of reviewed what we did there. Had they learnt new things, could they then share that with their teams when they went back to their faculty based, you know, teams that they were working with and could they then have other people coming in and using the same model to learn about what was going on and get them up to speed. So that was the model that we did between 2013 and 2014 and we ended up with 10 faculty librarians who went through that program of work through the digital infrastructure area. And but one of them, Kerry Sullivan, was, she commenced, she was one of the two who originally started in 2013 and she continued on one day a week for the whole period for the whole period of one and a half years and we felt that was really important for that continuity for her to help train up new people as they came in to the area. So when I was saying each librarian came in for eight weeks, it was one day a week for eight weeks. So it was really only eight days. It sounds like a lot, but it's only eight days and they had a lot to do in order to learn new things and get up to speed, I guess. Just in terms of our restructure and where we were sitting, and we, this is the digital infrastructure area as it was. So we were under Jeff Payne as our associate university librarian and this area in red here that I've got a sort of a dotted red line here is the group that were working on the research data management work with the repository and advocacy with researchers and all that sort of area. And we had the research, what we called research data librarians come into our area and work with that group. So we had other repository staff down here and we also had other staff working in different areas. So a team of about 11 people at that time, but only four people, or three people sort of involved in the research data management side and the librarians coming in and then the repository team underneath that. Now, following our restructure at the end of last year, this is what the new team looks like and this is the research team now. So it's a new team completely dedicated to supporting high degree research students and researchers across the university, across all our campuses. So the positions in blue are the new ones that came into the area and had to be advertised and we recruited those people. There are other people who came across in the restructure from different areas or we had to go out and recruit new people. And then the other ones in sort of this gray color here where the people already in place dealing with the repository, dealing with the research data management and all those areas. And so I moved out of that area and Eva Fish is our manager of the research team and she manages that new research group that are supporting researchers and I'm her director. So our current approach is really what we've been doing is forming our new team and looking at all the services they provide to researchers to help them deal with their research. So it's not all about research data management. So there's a lot of dot points there sort of explaining the kinds of things that that group do. And it really is, it has been a fantastic thing that the library has decided to support researchers in it with a dedicated team who can put all of their efforts into supporting them. So they've got a lot to do. They're a new team. They've got a lot to learn. And through the restructure we've had only one or two people or two people who were involved in that earlier work coming into the digital infrastructure area learning about research data management who've continued on in the research team and others have moved on to the learning and teaching team. So the library in terms of our librarians who formerly were faculty librarians are now either in the learning and teaching team or they're in the research team. So it's been quite a shift in terms of how we support our academics and our high degree students. So just in terms of what people did when they were trained up in our area, we threw an eight week program. There was a lot to do as I said before. So it was focused on a mentoring approach and self-paced learning as well as meetings with the digital infrastructure team going through training about what the work they're doing and how they support researchers and what their approach has been and looking at new ways of approaching academics and helping. So we had a sort of a general introduction as the first thing that came along to the digital infrastructure area and the work we did. Then after that a mentoring from Kerry Sullivan who was already working in the area one day a week covering the kind of approach we've had and the kinds of conversations we're having with researchers. Then a self-paced learning approach where each of the librarians who came into our area really went through all of the sort of things like ANS webinars, the different websites they'd found, different areas that we noted as being really important sites for them to get up to speed with and understand. They also went through previous minutes and agendas from meetings through the last year or so that we'd had in terms of our ANS projects and what we'd done and where we'd got to and speaking with each individual in the digital infrastructure team. Then getting up to speed with all of that information which took some time as a steep learning curve. It's a bit like saying here's a couple of two or three years of knowledge about research data management that we're going to throw at you in like an eight day period. It's a heck of a lot to learn. Once they were confident that they knew something about what we were trying to achieve then going out and contacting their researchers that they have dealt with in the different faculties and talking to them, emailing them initially, then following up, finding out where they're at, talking about what we're doing and what we're trying to achieve and finding out if they have research data needs and what they were and publishing through the repository. We also had a sort of a general training template that we, a training template that was built up by the librarians to do training of academics and high degree research students about research data management. So that was one of the tasks we set as being go and create that and do that and we're going to run some training sessions later in the year when people are comfortable get that whole template working and get all the information prepared and ready so that each of those librarians could go and deliver those sessions, those training sessions. And then one of the early tasks that was also undertaken was to create a lib guide on using lib guides to create a research data management lib guide to really sort of record and cover all of the sort of key things that we thought were important around research data management and use as either a training tool or a tool to refer people to as help for training other librarians as they came in to the area, all those kind of things. We covered things like what were the drivers for change, why are we doing this work now, what have been the drivers, what are the funding agencies saying, what's the government saying, what do we need to be saying to academics to say why would they even be interested in this. So going through the whole background around that and what it means and getting familiar with the guidelines and those areas so that people understood what they were talking about. So this is the kind of thing we covered. It's to do with the open access policies, things to do with research data and managing your research data. And then we went through also a sort of a very detailed run through what had been done locally in terms of our content and what we've been doing with it. So this is a list of some of the things that we really were covering and some of it really quite technical and sometimes maybe too technical, I don't know. But we wanted to get a sense of the work we'd done and the understanding from a repository side and a research data management side and then get the librarians to go away and think about how that meant in terms of them being able to understand that background and being able to sell the story and talk about it with some kind of confidence, I guess. So lots of acronyms, lots of new things that people had to know about if they didn't already. So things like OAPMH and DC metadata and link data and open access and all sorts of things in terms of how we've set up our repository and the work we've done. We also looked at local issues at Latrobe, so our own data management policy and where that's at and what it says, getting people to understand what that meant and also, as I said before, in terms of covering the ANDS and all the advocacy that ANDS have done in this area, going back and reviewing those, the advice they've got on the ANDS website and all the really useful information that ANDS has produced over the past few years. In terms of the repository, we also wanted to go through things in detail about what we had in the repository, what was driving the content going in, what types of information we had in there, what formats they were in, how it got in there, all those kind of things and getting people really familiar with that. And I guess one of the things about the repository also, people working in the repository space for a long time, has been that the repository is like a portal for pushing information out externally beyond the university, so that there's discovery of that material externally and it drives traffic back to the repository and back to the university. And really going through that, it's not just a catalogue internally of what we have, it's also pushing and publicising that information out and what the impact of that is and what it means. And that was a sort of a different perspective, I guess, for some people. And then, I guess, broader issues expanding that out into things like official standards that we use in order to deal with the data that's in the repository. So new concepts like RIFCS and EACCPF, issues around maintaining identifiers for people and for records in the repository, what data curation means and the managing of the data and the best practice around that and looking at ANS advice on that, looking at webinars and information from there, the digital curation centre, different sites, different experiences from other institutions. And then covering that whole, you know, where does our data go and what does it really mean in terms of getting it out to research data Australia, minting DOIs from data site.org and pushing that information into data citation index and what does that mean, all that kind of thing. The, I guess, the other thing around self-paced learning is that the mantra site is something we got everyone to go through. There's a lot of information in there but, you know, a fantastic site for people to really understand a whole lot about research data management. So that was something that was great that people really found, you know, librarians found that as a really useful resource, it was easy to use and accessible, it was open, you know, a low barrier to going in there and just actually engaging with that and understanding that site. And I think we're all excited about Melbourne University wanting to do like a local mantra for an Australianised one, that'd be a great thing coming along at some point. And in terms of capturing what people were learning, we also had our librarians created a Google site, this is the front page of it, which they used as a wiki to really record their own actions and their own thoughts about things and get themselves organised and put useful information on that site so that they could share with their colleagues either when they're in the digital infrastructure area or when they're back at their desk doing their normal day-to-day work. It was a really good place where they could, you know, communicate that between different staff, they could really reflect and record, you know, what was going on and instigate new programs. And, but it also, because it was a Google site, it needed to be, it was locked down to people who'd created that site, two or three or four, and as the 10 came in, they were invited into that site. I think in retrospect, I'd be thinking we needed probably more of a broader site for everyone to have access to because not everyone could see what was in there initially. This is the LibGuide and what it looked like in terms of the site that's been created around research data management. That was a good learning instrument for people coming into the research data management area, a good guide for librarians to use themselves and has had some engagement and hits from researchers and some feedback about it. I guess from a librarian perspective of the people who worked in the area, from their point of view, they saw, they had a different perspective on the work being done around research data management and advocacy and what was being done. They have a very service-oriented mentality, really wanting to help clients with their needs and that was a really good thing. It really brought a different focus to the research data management work that had been done previously which was more around servicing a few people's needs and getting the technology right and getting the systems up and working properly. The librarians really were great in terms of making sure everything was documented and understood widely and therefore could go and share their information amongst themselves and be able to advocate properly for research data management with their faculties. The librarians, they helped with the development and structure of the research data management planning form which we created. They provided a lot of advice on the structure of this page and other websites on the university site and on the library site around managing research data. They did a lot of detailed investigation of researcher profiles and identities and using social networking sites, using ResearchGate and academia, those kind of things. They did lots of research into that and how many people were using them and understanding what was being done there. They created an email template, a standard template to send out to academics around introducing themselves, what they were doing and asking if the researcher needed help with their research data. That was followed up with phone calls and messages and things and meetings. We just used an Excel spreadsheet to track those conversations between ourselves. That really was in lieu of having any kind of customer relationship management system which we still don't have and we need a better way of managing that. As I said before, they also created some classes around deamestifying data management which were quite successful and went around to different campuses of the university. We also did a couple of other things. We had some re-skilling for research workshops, one with Jenny Cameron in May 2013 which was excellent and we got all of the librarians involved in that as well as the people working on research data management and the repository. We also did the QUT subject on research support for academic libraries that Gillian Hallam runs as part of the Master's program there and that was a really excellent one as well. We did that in partnership with Caval and we had other people from different universities doing that at the same time. That was excellent. What worked and what didn't, the original approach was very low key so it was low barrier. It didn't put a lot of pressure on people to do things and get up to speed immediately. They were supported through their time in digital infrastructure. The period of succumbent was probably too short and did it really change what they were doing. It did sometimes and sometimes not. The new approach around our restructuring is having dedicated staff who can do this. A much more long-term approach is working well. More of an embedded approach so that they're really working with researchers as much as they can. They've got more time to learn the terminology and understand requirements although they probably would say maybe that's not true with our new structure and new academics coming on board and lots of demands for their time. It's still very, it's hard to get up to speed with all that and we need more time to train them up. What have the librarians said themselves? You can read those screenshots there. They found a really good way of learning new things and wanted to normalise as part of the normal work that they do and a really good way of supporting that work. I guess the thing to understand was it was a natural fit with their skills in terms of what they needed to do. Librarians are really great at advocating services and being able to have to advocate what understand what researchers do and how they do research and therefore dealing with research data and research data management isn't such a stretch especially when they're supported by people around them who have been doing that a lot. What we're going to do in the future is a whole lot more. Our research team is very new and so we've still got a lot more that we have to do with that team and we're looking at skills, assessment and identification of gaps and training that they need to do and looking at a whole range of services that we're doing that they can advocate for. I'd like to acknowledge the people listed in black are the people who initially did the work in the digital infrastructure area and came into that area and they were the ones who were trained up along with the staff in that area and then the new team is planning that ongoing training so Eva's leading that with Tracy and Roderick and others in the research team. That's all I have so thank you.
 So what I would like to cover is some of the things we have been doing at La Trobe for  a couple of years in training up research, librarians in research data management and  sort of where we have come from and where we are going to.  So I would just like to acknowledge that this presentation is sort of an adaptation of one  we did at the e-research conference last year in Melbourne and that was done with Kerry  Sullivan and Aminah Nichols-Boyd as well.  This is sort of an update of where we have come from and where we are going to.  Just I guess about La Trobe, we have this wonderful statue in our Bandura campus, our  Melbourne campus by the sculptor Charles Robb, which really sort of gives an indication  of what we are going to cover today.  And I guess what I will do is I will also talk a little bit about La Trobe if people  don't know that we were established in 1964 and we opened in 1967.  We have about 30,000 students and we are across five different campuses across the state of  Victoria and today I am at our wonderful Aubrey-Wedonga campus and we have other regional campuses  in Victoria and our main campus in Melbourne where the bulk of our students are.  I guess the metaphor here is that this sculpture is about universities turning ideas on their  heads and I guess our journey with our librarians learning about research data management for  them is really turning them on their heads and thinking differently about the work that  they do and how they support researchers.  And so I guess what we were coming from was a situation where we had librarians who were  supporting teaching and learning and research and doing their usual what we called faculty  librarian work and then coming in into the more technical area of the library which was  the digital infrastructure area last year and the year before in terms of looking at  the repository and research data management and more technical aspects of that work and  discovering what was being done there and how they could then advocate for that and  talk to researchers and support their needs.  And so I guess the other metaphor for the statue on its head is and the statues of Governor  Charles La Trobe actually I should say also in case you didn't notice.  The other metaphor is that the university has really turned itself on its head after  a big restructure last year.  So that's been a really big change for the university and the library is positioning  itself to help with that.  So what we've been what the university has been talking about is it's a future ready  agenda.  So we've been looking at it's the strategic plan and the research plan which is has a  really strong emphasis on supporting researchers and really making sure that they're productive  and that their research is well known and well described that we really help them promote  that research and that we position ourselves to really help them in terms of their what  their outputs are and in order for people to be productive to also I guess improve La  Trobe's situation in terms of how its research is known and what its international ranking  is and the income it gets from research and all those kind of areas.  And so that restructure of the university which has gone across the whole university  has really had a big impact on the library as well as I said.  So the library really has put itself in place to really work with researchers and do as  much as they can to help them.  This is the size of our population that La Trobe and where we're not a hugely research  intensive university but we still do a lot of research and we have a lot of people to  support so we see that as a really important thing for the library to support researchers  and we've really done a lot to make sure we can do that.  So I guess the new areas for our future ready agenda for the university were the five research  focus areas which are listed there and also the different disciplinary research programs  and so being able to engage with those different areas and really support them is seen as a  change for the library.  It's not just about supporting a particular faculty or a particular school.  It's really supporting researchers who are doing big projects across multi-disciplinary  areas and partnerships with other institutions and research income and all those kind of  things.  So they're really important.  What our approach was in the last couple of years, so 2013 to 2014, initially we had,  so as I mentioned before, we had a digital infrastructure team who were responsible for  our repository, the ANTS projects we'd done up until then in research data management  as well as other areas for the library but in terms of research data management it was  the focus on the repository and publishing data through the repository and it was just  done within that digital infrastructure team and all the work we'd done on ANTS projects,  we had a, you know, we'd done a couple of different ANTS projects to publish our data  through the repository and publish to research data Australia.  They were really focused on just the team in digital infrastructure working on that  and only involving other people from time to time.  So it was really done as a separate, very technical work, advocacy going out and talking  to academics but it really contained within that area and we felt that it was time to  really change that.  It was recognised in early 2013 that we needed to change that and get faculty librarians  to really engage with that work and train them up and get them up to speed because we  saw that that was the future, it was a really important thing for them to advocate for that  work that was being done.  So we had, initially had two faculty librarians who commenced in our area in digital infrastructure.  They were in there for an eight week period for one day a week and two librarians came  in and really we trained them up initially in what we were doing in the digital infrastructure  area.  So I'll cover what that was a little bit later and then what we thought was then how do we,  you know, is that a good model?  We sort of reviewed what we did there.  Had they learnt new things, could they then share that with their teams when they went  back to their faculty based, you know, teams that they were working with and could they  then have other people coming in and using the same model to learn about what was going  on and get them up to speed.  So that was the model that we did between 2013 and 2014 and we ended up with 10 faculty  librarians who went through that program of work through the digital infrastructure area.  And but one of them, Kerry Sullivan, was, she commenced, she was one of the two who originally  started in 2013 and she continued on one day a week for the whole period for the whole  period of one and a half years and we felt that was really important for that continuity  for her to help train up new people as they came in to the area.  So when I was saying each librarian came in for eight weeks, it was one day a week for  eight weeks.  So it was really only eight days.  It sounds like a lot, but it's only eight days and they had a lot to do in order to learn  new things and get up to speed, I guess.  Just in terms of our restructure and where we were sitting, and we, this is the digital  infrastructure area as it was.  So we were under Jeff Payne as our associate university librarian and this area in red here  that I've got a sort of a dotted red line here is the group that were working on the  research data management work with the repository and advocacy with researchers and all that  sort of area.  And we had the research, what we called research data librarians come into our area and work  with that group.  So we had other repository staff down here and we also had other staff working in different  areas.  So a team of about 11 people at that time, but only four people, or three people sort  of involved in the research data management side and the librarians coming in and then  the repository team underneath that.  Now, following our restructure at the end of last year, this is what the new team looks  like and this is the research team now.  So it's a new team completely dedicated to supporting high degree research students and  researchers across the university, across all our campuses.  So the positions in blue are the new ones that came into the area and had to be advertised  and we recruited those people.  There are other people who came across in the restructure from different areas or we  had to go out and recruit new people.  And then the other ones in sort of this gray color here where the people already in place  dealing with the repository, dealing with the research data management and all those areas.  And so I moved out of that area and Eva Fish is our manager of the research team and she  manages that new research group that are supporting researchers and I'm her director.  So our current approach is really what we've been doing is forming our new team and looking  at all the services they provide to researchers to help them deal with their research.  So it's not all about research data management.  So there's a lot of dot points there sort of explaining the kinds of things that that  group do.  And it really is, it has been a fantastic thing that the library has decided to support  researchers in it with a dedicated team who can put all of their efforts into supporting  them.  So they've got a lot to do.  They're a new team.  They've got a lot to learn.  And through the restructure we've had only one or two people or two people who were involved  in that earlier work coming into the digital infrastructure area learning about research  data management who've continued on in the research team and others have moved on to  the learning and teaching team.  So the library in terms of our librarians who formerly were faculty librarians are now  either in the learning and teaching team or they're in the research team.  So it's been quite a shift in terms of how we support our academics and our high degree  students.  So just in terms of what people did when they were trained up in our area, we threw an eight  week program.  There was a lot to do as I said before.  So it was focused on a mentoring approach and self-paced learning as well as meetings  with the digital infrastructure team going through training about what the work they're  doing and how they support researchers and what their approach has been and looking at  new ways of approaching academics and helping.  So we had a sort of a general introduction as the first thing that came along to the  digital infrastructure area and the work we did.  Then after that a mentoring from Kerry Sullivan who was already working in the area one day  a week covering the kind of approach we've had and the kinds of conversations we're  having with researchers.  Then a self-paced learning approach where each of the librarians who came into our area  really went through all of the sort of things like ANS webinars, the different websites  they'd found, different areas that we noted as being really important sites for them to  get up to speed with and understand.  They also went through previous minutes and agendas from meetings through the last year  or so that we'd had in terms of our ANS projects and what we'd done and where we'd got to and  speaking with each individual in the digital infrastructure team.  Then getting up to speed with all of that information which took some time as a steep  learning curve.  It's a bit like saying here's a couple of two or three years of knowledge about research  data management that we're going to throw at you in like an eight day period.  It's a heck of a lot to learn.  Once they were confident that they knew something about what we were trying to achieve then  going out and contacting their researchers that they have dealt with in the different  faculties and talking to them, emailing them initially, then following up, finding out  where they're at, talking about what we're doing and what we're trying to achieve and  finding out if they have research data needs and what they were and publishing through  the repository.  We also had a sort of a general training template that we, a training template that  was built up by the librarians to do training of academics and high degree research students  about research data management.  So that was one of the tasks we set as being go and create that and do that and we're going  to run some training sessions later in the year when people are comfortable get that  whole template working and get all the information prepared and ready so that each of those librarians  could go and deliver those sessions, those training sessions.  And then one of the early tasks that was also undertaken was to create a lib guide on using  lib guides to create a research data management lib guide to really sort of record and cover  all of the sort of key things that we thought were important around research data management  and use as either a training tool or a tool to refer people to as help for training other  librarians as they came in to the area, all those kind of things.  We covered things like what were the drivers for change, why are we doing this work now,  what have been the drivers, what are the funding agencies saying, what's the government saying,  what do we need to be saying to academics to say why would they even be interested in  this.  So going through the whole background around that and what it means and getting familiar  with the guidelines and those areas so that people understood what they were talking about.  So this is the kind of thing we covered.  It's to do with the open access policies, things to do with research data and managing  your research data.  And then we went through also a sort of a very detailed run through what had been done  locally in terms of our content and what we've been doing with it.  So this is a list of some of the things that we really were covering and some of it really  quite technical and sometimes maybe too technical, I don't know.  But we wanted to get a sense of the work we'd done and the understanding from a repository  side and a research data management side and then get the librarians to go away and think  about how that meant in terms of them being able to understand that background and being  able to sell the story and talk about it with some kind of confidence, I guess.  So lots of acronyms, lots of new things that people had to know about if they didn't already.  So things like OAPMH and DC metadata and link data and open access and all sorts of things  in terms of how we've set up our repository and the work we've done.  We also looked at local issues at Latrobe, so our own data management policy and where  that's at and what it says, getting people to understand what that meant and also, as  I said before, in terms of covering the ANDS and all the advocacy that ANDS have done in  this area, going back and reviewing those, the advice they've got on the ANDS website  and all the really useful information that ANDS has produced over the past few years.  In terms of the repository, we also wanted to go through things in detail about what  we had in the repository, what was driving the content going in, what types of information  we had in there, what formats they were in, how it got in there, all those kind of things  and getting people really familiar with that.  And I guess one of the things about the repository also, people working in the repository space  for a long time, has been that the repository is like a portal for pushing information out  externally beyond the university, so that there's discovery of that material externally  and it drives traffic back to the repository and back to the university.  And really going through that, it's not just a catalogue internally of what we have, it's  also pushing and publicising that information out and what the impact of that is and what  it means.  And that was a sort of a different perspective, I guess, for some people.  And then, I guess, broader issues expanding that out into things like official standards  that we use in order to deal with the data that's in the repository.  So new concepts like RIFCS and EACCPF, issues around maintaining identifiers for people and  for records in the repository, what data curation means and the managing of the data and the  best practice around that and looking at ANS advice on that, looking at webinars and information  from there, the digital curation centre, different sites, different experiences from other institutions.  And then covering that whole, you know, where does our data go and what does it really mean  in terms of getting it out to research data Australia, minting DOIs from data site.org  and pushing that information into data citation index and what does that mean, all that kind  of thing.  The, I guess, the other thing around self-paced learning is that the mantra site is something  we got everyone to go through.  There's a lot of information in there but, you know, a fantastic site for people to really  understand a whole lot about research data management.  So that was something that was great that people really found, you know, librarians  found that as a really useful resource, it was easy to use and accessible, it was open,  you know, a low barrier to going in there and just actually engaging with that and understanding  that site.  And I think we're all excited about Melbourne University wanting to do like a local mantra  for an Australianised one, that'd be a great thing coming along at some point.  And in terms of capturing what people were learning, we also had our librarians created  a Google site, this is the front page of it, which they used as a wiki to really record  their own actions and their own thoughts about things and get themselves organised and put  useful information on that site so that they could share with their colleagues either when  they're in the digital infrastructure area or when they're back at their desk doing their  normal day-to-day work.  It was a really good place where they could, you know, communicate that between different  staff, they could really reflect and record, you know, what was going on and instigate  new programs.  And, but it also, because it was a Google site, it needed to be, it was locked down  to people who'd created that site, two or three or four, and as the 10 came in, they  were invited into that site.  I think in retrospect, I'd be thinking we needed probably more of a broader site for  everyone to have access to because not everyone could see what was in there initially.  This is the LibGuide and what it looked like in terms of the site that's been created around  research data management.  That was a good learning instrument for people coming into the research data management area,  a good guide for librarians to use themselves and has had some engagement and hits from  researchers and some feedback about it.  I guess from a librarian perspective of the people who worked in the area, from their  point of view, they saw, they had a different perspective on the work being done around  research data management and advocacy and what was being done.  They have a very service-oriented mentality, really wanting to help clients with their  needs and that was a really good thing.  It really brought a different focus to the research data management work that had been  done previously which was more around servicing a few people's needs and getting the technology  right and getting the systems up and working properly.  The librarians really were great in terms of making sure everything was documented and  understood widely and therefore could go and share their information amongst themselves  and be able to advocate properly for research data management with their faculties.  The librarians, they helped with the development and structure of the research data management  planning form which we created.  They provided a lot of advice on the structure of this page and other websites on the university  site and on the library site around managing research data.  They did a lot of detailed investigation of researcher profiles and identities and using  social networking sites, using ResearchGate and academia, those kind of things.  They did lots of research into that and how many people were using them and understanding  what was being done there.  They created an email template, a standard template to send out to academics around introducing  themselves, what they were doing and asking if the researcher needed help with their research  data.  That was followed up with phone calls and messages and things and meetings.  We just used an Excel spreadsheet to track those conversations between ourselves.  That really was in lieu of having any kind of customer relationship management system  which we still don't have and we need a better way of managing that.  As I said before, they also created some classes around deamestifying data management which  were quite successful and went around to different campuses of the university.  We also did a couple of other things.  We had some re-skilling for research workshops, one with Jenny Cameron in May 2013 which was  excellent and we got all of the librarians involved in that as well as the people working  on research data management and the repository.  We also did the QUT subject on research support for academic libraries that Gillian Hallam  runs as part of the Master's program there and that was a really excellent one as well.  We did that in partnership with Caval and we had other people from different universities  doing that at the same time.  That was excellent.  What worked and what didn't, the original approach was very low key so it was low barrier.  It didn't put a lot of pressure on people to do things and get up to speed immediately.  They were supported through their time in digital infrastructure.  The period of succumbent was probably too short and did it really change what they were  doing.  It did sometimes and sometimes not.  The new approach around our restructuring is having dedicated staff who can do this.  A much more long-term approach is working well.  More of an embedded approach so that they're really working with researchers as much as  they can.  They've got more time to learn the terminology and understand requirements although they probably  would say maybe that's not true with our new structure and new academics coming on board  and lots of demands for their time.  It's still very, it's hard to get up to speed with all that and we need more time to train  them up.  What have the librarians said themselves?  You can read those screenshots there.  They found a really good way of learning new things and wanted to normalise as part of  the normal work that they do and a really good way of supporting that work.  I guess the thing to understand was it was a natural fit with their skills in terms of  what they needed to do.  Librarians are really great at advocating services and being able to have to advocate  what understand what researchers do and how they do research and therefore dealing with  research data and research data management isn't such a stretch especially when they're  supported by people around them who have been doing that a lot.  What we're going to do in the future is a whole lot more.  Our research team is very new and so we've still got a lot more that we have to do with  that team and we're looking at skills, assessment and identification of gaps and training that  they need to do and looking at a whole range of services that we're doing that they can  advocate for.  I'd like to acknowledge the people listed in black are the people who initially did the  work in the digital infrastructure area and came into that area and they were the ones  who were trained up along with the staff in that area and then the new team is planning  that ongoing training so Eva's leading that with Tracy and Roderick and others in the  research team.  That's all I have so thank you.
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