Flying Solo: Data librarians working outside of traditional roles - Presented by McCafferty
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McCafferty, Siobhann
Did you know there are data librarians who work outside of (traditional) libraries? For some, being a data librarian means leaving the relative comfort of the library behind and ‘flying solo’ into unchartered territory. These are new and demanding roles that require a steep learning curve with minimal support. In this webinar, three data librarians working outside of libraries will share their experience of going it alone, reflecting on these challenging yet rewarding roles that push the boundaries of librarianship and open new opportunities for the profession. Siobhann McCafferty is based at QUT’s Institute for Future Environments in Brisbane and is the Research Data Coordinator for the National Agricultural Nitrous Oxide Research Program (NANORP). She is embedded in the Healthy Ecosystems and Environmental Management group at IFE and works with researchers from across Australia to store program data and make it discoverable and reusable.
 Okay, my name is Siobhan McCafferty and I'm the Research Data Coordinator for NANOP, which is the National Agricultural Nitrous Oxide Research Program. NANOP is the most recent iteration of a National Nitrous Oxide and Gas Emissions Research Program, hence the name, and this program brings together researchers from at least 10 Australian universities and six institutions and government. NANOP's coordinated from QUT in Brisbane and I'm part of a small team of two embedded in the Healthy Ecosystems and Environmental Monitoring Group, which is part of the Institute for Future Environments. My job covers all things data management, but the focus of it now is a service manager for the interway data repository and portal. For those who like technical information, the portal is our own version of a Metacat repository, which is Java and Tomcat, developed by the Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity, using the software's web server, a Postgres relational database management system, and an LDAP. Other features that were spliced on are a GeoServer software for mapping and a web interface which allows users to access and interact with the records. We also have an OAI-PMH Metadata Harvest Research Data Australia and the system has an integrated DOI minting facility, minting providing by ANS using a nice little piece of software called Website Content Managed using DREAMLA CMS, PHP, and MySQL as a database, and I do all of the content for the website. I also advise on data and metadata standards, licensing and access, and encourage researchers to provide us with their data and metadata, either by self upload or via Morpho Upload Software, integrated DOI minting facility and our minting services provided by ANS with a nifty little piece of software that we developed called DOI Monkey. Website contents managed with DREAMLA, PHP, and MySQL as a database, so there's a whole lot of stuff going on in the background that's taken care of by our wonderful developer Moises. I also advise on data and metadata standards, licensing and access, and I encourage researchers to provide us with their data and metadata, either by self upload via Morpho or with my help. I spend a fair amount of time talking to researchers about what they need, how to get their data where it's meant to be, and how to make it useful for other people. How did I get where I am now? Like many librarians, this is not my first career. My academic background was in philosophy and religious studies, and I began my studies in Wellington, New Zealand at Victoria, and I continued at Sterling and over at the University of Glasgow. I've got lots of years teaching at universities and working in libraries to support myself while I tried to develop an academic career. So consequently, I had a nice collection of soft skills and technical experience. So when the GFC hit Europe and jobs in the humanities became scarce, I moved countries and I began training to be an archivist, which eventually became a study for Masters in Information Management at ECU and led to my current incarnation. While I was nearing the end of my studies, I took on a short-term contract with a new e-research team based at the Institute for Sustainable Resources at QUT. That team was externally funded by Project Work and our bread and butter was repositories and data portals for scientific research and developing scientific software and applications. I was also involved in a few ANDS projects and also with the turn data portal, which Michelle was working on, so got to know a few people. In 2012, ISR disbanded and became the Institute for Future Environments at QUT and I was absorbed into the heme, so absorbed back into the bloodstream of the Institute. And for the remaining duration of the NANOP program, I was there data librarian or research data coordinator. The main challenges of my work will be familiar to everyone. The first one is working in an emergent sector. Data librarians and information specialists don't fit in traditional boxes and it's often difficult for employers and funders to see why and where you fit and that can make writing proposal costings difficult. So when projects come up that will need my work, it's often been difficult to say why they need my work. I was very lucky to work in a project, an overarching project that was willing to take on new technologies and try and develop them. But sometimes your funders don't really understand that, which brings us to funding. NANOP researchers work with gas emissions and climate change and they're not very favored areas of funding at the moment, unfortunately. There's also been a lot of cuts to long-term research funding, which has put a serious squeeze on research and made it necessary for us to curtail sun schemes and change the scope of others. It's also not enough to expand my role to fill the gaps where other members of staff may have been, which I think has been quite positive actually. Most of our projects are short-term and run on a skeleton staff now and funding will also unfortunately endanger the future of my portal. So it's possible that we're going to lose this internationally important collection. To counter this, we've changed some of our practices and descriptions of our aims. For example, instead of our research looking at farming practices and man-made gas emissions, we talk about increasing yields for low fertilizer usage. We try and make what we're doing very focused towards farmer needs, agricultural needs, and working with industry to provide solutions rather than a purely academic kind of climate modeling focus. The other challenge has been culture change. Soil science is a very traditional area, or has been, and being part of an emergent sector working in an interdisciplinary way with a traditional area has been very challenging, but also a lot of fun. So research in general as well as traditionally being an area where sitting on your data and keeping it secure and secret was necessary. And the way to get ahead in your academic career was to have exclusive data to write about. And the more exclusive and more secret the data, the better. Working to spread the idea that sharing data was the way forward, and even more so, open data was the way forward, it's been very difficult. So I've employed carrot and stick methods. So we have a really useful big stick, which is our researchers get funding for supplying us with their data. It's built into their contracts, so no data, no funding. But I don't want to use the stick all the time, I prefer the carrot, and I want to really make researchers aware of the benefits of making a data open, and putting it into a repository such as ours, putting DOI on things, linking things up, it's going to be beneficial, particularly to early career researchers, because they're the guys that are going to drive this. So making open data and data sharing work for my researchers has been key. We've got really tight licensing and attribution controls so they can see their data is protected. And we make sure to broadcast any good use of our data. Someone uses it in an article, make sure everyone in the network knows about it, someone gets published, everyone knows about it. We make sure to broadcast all the good press and make researchers aware that they can use other open data as well to augment their own, so kind of spread the good news. How do I manage without supporting confines of a library? I was really lucky when I picked up that first contract. I had a great mentor and friend as my manager, and he helped walk me through a lot of things that I needed to know. It was a massive learning curve and it was really daunting to walk into, fresh from study as well, and changing sectors. But I was invited to every meeting going, every workshop, and every product presentation, whether I really needed to be there or not for a while. So I was made aware of the complexity of data and metadata management and encouraged to read and explore current issues in the area. Slowly I built a very practical picture of data librarianship as it applied to me, maybe not as broad as other people, but certainly I learned what I needed to know. I also had a team that was willing, when it had the funding, to take the risk on an emergent area and send me to get training as the need arose and made sure I could attend workshops. If I asked to go to something, 99% in the time, yes, no problem, how can we help, which was wonderful. I also have an excellent relationship with the library. I'm sitting in it right now, I actually work here two days a week at the moment, and I've worked with them as much as possible towards common goals, and they've really included me and others like me in the university in their planning. We consult relevant aspects of both our domains, we go to a lot of the same meetings. I've also got a strong project team. We've in the past been larger, but now there's two of us, and my developer is a great guy, really knowledgeable, willing to sit down and explain things to me. He is endless patients, and likewise, anything that he needed to know, I sat down, talked him through it as well. The last thing would be, because I'm part of the university, I am subject to staff development. So even though I'm not really within the university, DUDL, librarian group when I'm working for IFA, but I can still get access to the same training, for example, project management training, I was able to attend that. And last on the screen, there was willingness to ask for help. I was really lucky during some of our projects that everyone was in the same boat. We were developing things from scratch. We were making new exciting products. And I could ask, what are you doing? How are you doing it? I'd ask guys at Ann's, QUT, the guy in the coffee shop. I asked everyone their opinions. How do I develop my skills? I think I kind of covered that there. I just went to everything going. I've maybe got a real eclectic collection of qualifications and skills because of that. But yeah, every time I needed to upskill, I had the opportunity or I could seek out the opportunity and was supported. So what advice would I give to others who are thinking of moving into a role such as yours? First of all, I've said this before, be an advocate for your users, front end and back end. They're the people that create and consume the data and the metadata. They're our ultimate audience. And if the product doesn't suit them, then it won't get used. No matter how pretty it is or how much work you've put in, nobody will want it. So ask your research is what they need and be prepared to negotiate and make concessions from your ideals about data management to make sure that they get that. Be flexible. Having an open and flexible attitude invites open and flexible dialogue. If a researcher is having problems with the software and everyone does, it's not the easiest thing to use, then I'll try and find the best way to help them. Some people like emails, some people like online help, some people like to be visited. If they have firewall problems, I will upload their data sets even though I encourage them very strongly to do it themselves. If they break the internet, I will fly to help them even if they're in Western Australia, I will be there. Keep high standards because data repositories are evolving and it's an emergent area. It's easy for people who are newly in contact with data librarianship to say, oh, that'll do. It looks good. Fine. But in keeping to a Greek best practice and industry standard and being seen to do so, you convey the importance of data management and storage and you find that people will rise to your standards as well, especially when you can couple that with a willingness to be flexible in your approach and to help your contributors. You'll hopefully end up with an excellent product for the end. For example, I have researchers who are very, very busy. I say, I know you're busy, but we really need all those metadata fields. Here's a pre-filled and Word document with what I already have. You just need technical details. Get it back to me. Get it up. That way everyone reaches their deadlines, milestones are met and everyone's happy. That's me. Thank you very much, everyone. Any questions? How do we attract people to data librarianship when it's largely unknown, misunderstood field? Go and talk at them about it and how wonderful it is. Attract people to come and beat other librarians. Really go, for me, go to different academic streams, go to different disciplines and talk to people about how they can apply what they know because a lot of the time, you know, we develop these collection of skills and there's not all the jobs there in academia or an industry. And people who know a little bit about an area can learn a lot about another thing, put them together and suddenly they go to data librarians. How to make it attractive? I don't know. Maybe, yeah, we just talk to them a lot more. Be more present. Don't hide in cupboards like I'm doing at the moment. We've got another one that comes in that says, are there traditional librarian skills that give a pathway into data librarianship? Sure. Catalogging. I learned a whole lot when I was doing my paper on cataloging that I directly apply all the time. But I'm maybe not the best person to ask because I'm not a very traditional librarian and I purposefully negotiated my way through my qualifications. So I didn't need to do very traditional librarian things. I think all of the skills that we develop in traditional librarianship are applicable. Especially the people skills, interview techniques, all of them. You mentioned you attended as many conferences, etc. to learn. How did you convince management to fund this as I'd like to attend anything as there is no not money? Yeah, when we had funding early in the projects, that was a lot easier. I will admit that. But I also do fund myself in some situations. So they'll partially fund me or I will pay for something and agree that I can have the time during work to go to it. So some of it is negotiation time because of funding issues. Fantastic. Thank you everyone.
 Okay, my name is Siobhan McCafferty and I'm the Research Data Coordinator for NANOP,  which is the National Agricultural Nitrous Oxide Research Program.  NANOP is the most recent iteration of a National Nitrous Oxide and Gas Emissions Research Program,  hence the name, and this program brings together researchers from at least 10 Australian  universities and six institutions and government. NANOP's coordinated from QUT in Brisbane and I'm  part of a small team of two embedded in the Healthy Ecosystems and Environmental Monitoring  Group, which is part of the Institute for Future Environments. My job covers all things data  management, but the focus of it now is a service manager for the interway data repository and portal.  For those who like technical information, the portal is our own version of a Metacat  repository, which is Java and Tomcat, developed by the Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity,  using the software's web server, a Postgres relational database management system, and an  LDAP. Other features that were spliced on are a GeoServer software for mapping and a web interface  which allows users to access and interact with the records. We also have an OAI-PMH Metadata  Harvest Research Data Australia and the system has an integrated DOI minting facility,  minting providing by ANS using a nice little piece of software called Website Content Managed  using DREAMLA CMS, PHP, and MySQL as a database, and I do all of the content for the website.  I also advise on data and metadata standards, licensing and access, and encourage researchers  to provide us with their data and metadata, either by self upload or via Morpho Upload Software,  integrated DOI minting facility and our minting services provided by ANS with a nifty little  piece of software that we developed called DOI Monkey. Website contents managed with DREAMLA,  PHP, and MySQL as a database, so there's a whole lot of stuff going on in the background  that's taken care of by our wonderful developer Moises. I also advise on data and metadata standards,  licensing and access, and I encourage researchers to provide us with their data and metadata,  either by self upload via Morpho or with my help. I spend a fair amount of time talking to researchers  about what they need, how to get their data where it's meant to be, and how to make it useful for  other people. How did I get where I am now? Like many librarians, this is not my first career.  My academic background was in philosophy and religious studies, and I began my studies in  Wellington, New Zealand at Victoria, and I continued at Sterling and over at the University of Glasgow.  I've got lots of years teaching at universities and working in libraries to support myself while I  tried to develop an academic career. So consequently, I had a nice collection of soft skills and  technical experience. So when the GFC hit Europe and jobs in the humanities became scarce, I moved  countries and I began training to be an archivist, which eventually became a study for Masters in  Information Management at ECU and led to my current incarnation. While I was nearing the end of my  studies, I took on a short-term contract with a new e-research team based at the Institute for  Sustainable Resources at QUT. That team was externally funded by Project Work and our bread  and butter was repositories and data portals for scientific research and developing scientific  software and applications. I was also involved in a few ANDS projects and also with the turn  data portal, which Michelle was working on, so got to know a few people. In 2012, ISR disbanded  and became the Institute for Future Environments at QUT and I was absorbed into the heme, so  absorbed back into the bloodstream of the Institute. And for the remaining duration of the NANOP  program, I was there data librarian or research data coordinator. The main challenges of my work  will be familiar to everyone. The first one is working in an emergent sector. Data librarians and  information specialists don't fit in traditional boxes and it's often difficult for employers and  funders to see why and where you fit and that can make writing proposal costings difficult. So when  projects come up that will need my work, it's often been difficult to say why they need my work.  I was very lucky to work in a project, an overarching project that was willing to take on  new technologies and try and develop them. But sometimes your funders don't really understand  that, which brings us to funding. NANOP researchers work with gas emissions and climate change and  they're not very favored areas of funding at the moment, unfortunately. There's also been a lot of  cuts to long-term research funding, which has put a serious squeeze on research and made it  necessary for us to curtail sun schemes and change the scope of others. It's also not  enough to expand my role to fill the gaps where other members of staff may have been,  which I think has been quite positive actually. Most of our projects are short-term and run on  a skeleton staff now and funding will also unfortunately endanger the future of my portal.  So it's possible that we're going to lose this internationally important collection.  To counter this, we've changed some of our practices and descriptions of our aims. For  example, instead of our research looking at farming practices and man-made gas emissions,  we talk about increasing yields for low fertilizer usage. We try and make what we're doing very  focused towards farmer needs, agricultural needs, and working with industry to provide solutions  rather than a purely academic kind of climate modeling focus. The other challenge has been  culture change. Soil science is a very traditional area, or has been, and being part of an emergent  sector working in an interdisciplinary way with a traditional area has been very challenging,  but also a lot of fun. So research in general as well as traditionally being an area where  sitting on your data and keeping it secure and secret was necessary. And the way to get ahead  in your academic career was to have exclusive data to write about. And the more exclusive and more  secret the data, the better. Working to spread the idea that sharing data was the way forward,  and even more so, open data was the way forward, it's been very difficult. So I've  employed carrot and stick methods. So we have a really useful big stick, which is our researchers  get funding for supplying us with their data. It's built into their contracts, so no data, no  funding. But I don't want to use the stick all the time, I prefer the carrot, and I want to really  make researchers aware of the benefits of making a data open, and putting it into a repository such  as ours, putting DOI on things, linking things up, it's going to be beneficial, particularly to  early career researchers, because they're the guys that are going to drive this. So making open data  and data sharing work for my researchers has been key. We've got really tight licensing and  attribution controls so they can see their data is protected. And we make sure to broadcast any good  use of our data. Someone uses it in an article, make sure everyone in the network knows about it,  someone gets published, everyone knows about it. We make sure to broadcast all the good press  and make researchers aware that they can use other open data as well to augment their own,  so kind of spread the good news. How do I manage without supporting confines of a library?  I was really lucky when I picked up that first contract. I had a great mentor and friend as  my manager, and he helped walk me through a lot of things that I needed to know. It was a massive  learning curve and it was really daunting to walk into, fresh from study as well, and changing  sectors. But I was invited to every meeting going, every workshop, and every product presentation,  whether I really needed to be there or not for a while. So I was made aware of the complexity  of data and metadata management and encouraged to read and explore current issues in the area.  Slowly I built a very practical picture of data librarianship as it applied to me, maybe not as  broad as other people, but certainly I learned what I needed to know. I also had a team that was  willing, when it had the funding, to take the risk on an emergent area and send me to get training  as the need arose and made sure I could attend workshops. If I asked to go to something, 99%  in the time, yes, no problem, how can we help, which was wonderful. I also have an excellent  relationship with the library. I'm sitting in it right now, I actually work here two days a week  at the moment, and I've worked with them as much as possible towards common goals, and they've really  included me and others like me in the university in their planning. We consult relevant aspects of  both our domains, we go to a lot of the same meetings. I've also got a strong project team.  We've in the past been larger, but now there's two of us, and my developer is a great guy,  really knowledgeable, willing to sit down and explain things to me. He is endless patients,  and likewise, anything that he needed to know, I sat down, talked him through it as well.  The last thing would be, because I'm part of the university, I am subject to staff development.  So even though I'm not really within the university, DUDL, librarian group when I'm working for  IFA, but I can still get access to the same training, for example, project management training,  I was able to attend that. And last on the screen, there was willingness to ask for help.  I was really lucky during some of our projects that everyone was in the same boat.  We were developing things from scratch. We were making new exciting products.  And I could ask, what are you doing? How are you doing it? I'd ask guys at Ann's,  QUT, the guy in the coffee shop. I asked everyone their opinions. How do I develop my skills?  I think I kind of covered that there. I just went to everything going. I've maybe got a real  eclectic collection of qualifications and skills because of that. But yeah, every time I needed  to upskill, I had the opportunity or I could seek out the opportunity and was supported.  So what advice would I give to others who are thinking of moving into a role such as yours?  First of all, I've said this before, be an advocate for your users, front end and back end.  They're the people that create and consume the data and the metadata. They're our ultimate  audience. And if the product doesn't suit them, then it won't get used. No matter how pretty it is  or how much work you've put in, nobody will want it. So ask your research is what they need and  be prepared to negotiate and make concessions from your ideals about data management to make sure  that they get that. Be flexible. Having an open and flexible attitude invites open and flexible  dialogue. If a researcher is having problems with the software and everyone does, it's not the easiest  thing to use, then I'll try and find the best way to help them. Some people like emails, some people  like online help, some people like to be visited. If they have firewall problems, I will upload  their data sets even though I encourage them very strongly to do it themselves. If they break the  internet, I will fly to help them even if they're in Western Australia, I will be there. Keep high  standards because data repositories are evolving and it's an emergent area. It's easy for people who  are newly in contact with data librarianship to say, oh, that'll do. It looks good. Fine. But in  keeping to a Greek best practice and industry standard and being seen to do so, you convey the  importance of data management and storage and you find that people will rise to your standards as  well, especially when you can couple that with a willingness to be flexible in your approach and to  help your contributors. You'll hopefully end up with an excellent product for the end. For example,  I have researchers who are very, very busy. I say, I know you're busy, but we really need all those  metadata fields. Here's a pre-filled and Word document with what I already have. You just need  technical details. Get it back to me. Get it up. That way everyone reaches their deadlines,  milestones are met and everyone's happy. That's me. Thank you very much, everyone. Any questions?  How do we attract people to data librarianship when it's largely unknown, misunderstood field?  Go and talk at them about it and how wonderful it is. Attract people to come and beat other  librarians. Really go, for me, go to different academic streams, go to different disciplines  and talk to people about how they can apply what they know because a lot of the time,  you know, we develop these collection of skills and there's not all the jobs there in academia or  an industry. And people who know a little bit about an area can learn a lot about another thing,  put them together and suddenly they go to data librarians. How to make it attractive? I don't  know. Maybe, yeah, we just talk to them a lot more. Be more present. Don't hide in cupboards like I'm  doing at the moment. We've got another one that comes in that says, are there traditional librarian  skills that give a pathway into data librarianship? Sure. Catalogging. I learned a whole lot when I  was doing my paper on cataloging that I directly apply all the time. But I'm maybe not the best  person to ask because I'm not a very traditional librarian and I purposefully negotiated my way  through my qualifications. So I didn't need to do very traditional librarian things. I think all  of the skills that we develop in traditional librarianship are applicable. Especially the  people skills, interview techniques, all of them. You mentioned you attended as many conferences,  etc. to learn. How did you convince management to fund this as I'd like to attend anything  as there is no not money? Yeah, when we had funding early in the projects, that was a lot easier. I  will admit that. But I also do fund myself in some situations. So they'll partially fund me or I  will pay for something and agree that I can have the time during work to go to it. So some of it  is negotiation time because of funding issues. Fantastic. Thank you everyone.
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