Gathering Across Disciplines to Create Sensible Research Data Management Strategies

Gerry Bayne:

Welcome to the Coalition for Networked Information Podcast. I'm Gerry Bayne for EDUCAUSE. And on this episode, we feature a conversation with Alison Hitchens. She's the associate university librarian for collections, technology and scholarly communication at the University of Waterloo. You can find more conversations from the CNI meetings by visiting the EDUCAUSE Review website at er.edu.edu. Here's our conversation.

 

Gerry Bayne:

So, you're here presenting a project briefing and it's about bringing the research communities together. Could we start with talking about the Tri Agency and what that is and how that is in relation to these conversations that we're going to talk about?

Alison Hitchens:

Sure. For those not familiar with the Canadian environment, we have three main federal research funding agencies, which are SSHRC and NSERC and CIHR. So basically, covering across all the disciplines and when they coordinate together on whether policy guidelines, things like that, that comes out as the Triad agency. So, when you hear the Triad Agency, it's referring to those three agencies and they have coordinated on policies and in the past, it’s had an effect here in libraries. They had an open access policy that came out in 2015. They had a Triad agency statement of principles on digital data management that came out a number of years ago. And then finally in 2021, they came out with their research data management policy.

Gerry Bayne:

This is a government agency, obviously, right? Are you guys privy to some of the ways they come up with the policies that you need to adhere to?

Alison Hitchens:

There's usually consultation. Now, this is our office of research are the ones that are in most contact with the tri agencies and have point people for ongoing conversations, but they quite often are doing community outreach and consultations. So right now, for example, they're in the middle of taking a look at their Triad agency open access policy. They have a consultation period open, they've done a survey out to researchers. They'll been doing some other feedback when they had a draft RDM policy at one point and then looked to the community for feedback. So I know that there's stuff, a consultation that is involved along the way.

Gerry Bayne:

So can you talk a little bit about how you became involved in what seems like, I don't want to jump ahead here, but maybe you can control the narrative on this, how you got involved with creating some of these more communal and collaborative conversations with the research community?

Alison Hitchens:

So I would say in libraries in Canada, we have the Canadian Association of Research Libraries, or CARL And CARL has been working on, I guess, coordination around research data management for a number of years, and they created, I don’t know if organization's the right word, but they created the Portage Network, which is now part of the Digital Research Alliance of Canada. But at one point it was funded by the library community to begin with, and we started looking very early on at what are the things we need to do to help our researchers? And so they created the DMP assistant, which is hosted at the University of Alberta so that we can help researchers, data management planning. They set up a network of experts with that thought of not everybody across the RDM library community can equally build up that expertise. And so let's get some groups looking at, say, curation and groups looking at the DMP and different areas where we can build up some expertise that can be used across, and then that's now part of a different organization.

Alison Hitchens:

So I think in the library community, we also have a lot of consortia. So in Ontario, we're part of the Ontario Council of University Libraries, and of course there's other regional consortia. And so it's, I think a kind of an automatic thing in libraries to work together collaboratively on these things and knowing that we can't each work on it ourselves. I think the difference here within RDM is, of course, the libraries don't own all of research data management is across the research lifecycle we have the Office of Research doing their part, whether it's the grant funding or through the ethics board. We have IT working on storage and advanced research computing. And so I think the difference here was in our own institutions on the RDM, we'd already started having those collaborations across those different sectors of our institutions. And so when it came to this conversation, it was how to expand that community so it's not just the library talking to itself, which we do really well and we have great communities, but making sure that those other perspectives are drawn into that community as well.

Gerry Bayne:

Sounds like a national conference that you helped organize. And can you tell us, I found this really interesting. You can tell us the unique thing about this conference.

Alison Hitchens:

I think what was interesting, and I'll have to give a bit of a shout out to Ithaka S+R, because we had seen, they had done a call for some research that they were doing around RDM and they were looking for cohorts from different institutions, but they were going back to assess the gaps in RDM and the research needs. And in Canada, because we had to build these institutional strategies in response to the tri agency policy, we'd already done that gap analysis. So for some of us, it didn't necessarily make sense to join that cohort, but at the same time, we thought cohorts, that's a great idea. How do we think about that concept here in Canada, how we might get the community together? And SSHRC, which is the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, has a connections grant. And so we reached out to a few people in the community.

Alison Hitchens:

So, it's beyond just Waterloo, our colleagues at Calgary and Ottawa and some other partners to say, is there a way we can use this concept of bringing together cohorts that have library, office of research and IT, however that works at different institutions and bring together people for conversation. And so that was our original grant was we thought, oh, we'll have 10 cohorts, so about 30 people plus some speakers and researchers, things like that. We got interest from about 33 institutions, and it seemed a shame to have to choose amongst them and stop down the conversation. So we were fortunate enough that the library and the Office of Research at Waterloo stepped up to increase our funding so that we could actually say, okay, yes, all of you can come,

Gerry Bayne:

Right? That's like a hundred people

Alison Hitchens:

And we'll just have a bigger conference. So yeah, it was really exciting to see so much interest, people wanting to talk about their institutional strategies and how to implement them.

Gerry Bayne:

Right. And I thought it was so interesting to bring libraries, researchers and IT together into one thing. And were they speaking the same language? How did you corral these people getting productive conversation going?

Alison Hitchens:

I think, well, part of that's a lot of planning. We really wanted to focus on conversation. We had some panels to set the stage, and we did also hear from researchers so that people could hear about the challenges that our researchers are working on. But we wanted most of the time to be around conversation. And so we did a bit of mixture. So we had some opportunities where people could talk in a sense to each other. So, we had some conversations where the IT folks were sitting at a table together, office of research folks, library folks, and so on. But then we also mixed it up so that there were some conversations where if you're part of a large research institution that has a medical school that's a table, and now you've got a mixture of groups or if you're in more of a smaller university or college, that might be a table and so on, and making sure you have guiding questions.

Alison Hitchens:

But I do know that it's starting to learn from each other what piece do we play? So quite often the libraries, when we think research data management, besides the beginning part, we think about published data. So what happens at the end of the research cycle, and I think for our IT colleagues, they're often helping our researchers with that active data while they're still working on it and needing storage that's very transactional intensive as opposed to a repository. And so, it's even getting some of that out on the table when we talk about storage for research data, what the library's talking about and what IT is talking about might be different concepts and we need to get that out there.

Gerry Bayne:

That makes sense

Alison Hitchens:

Yeah.

Gerry Bayne:

What would you like folks to know and come away with in terms of ideas, strategies for getting folks together and solving problems

Alison Hitchens:

That we had really good response, not just in interest in coming to the workshop, but really good response that people found it to be a valuable experience. Partly the timing, obviously as we all had just published our institutional strategies and now have to figure out what to do. So the timing worked, but also they did really appreciate the intersection. The fact that we had those different folks together, even if they're already talking with those folks at their own institutions just as a community,

Alison Hitchens:

Didn't necessarily have that. And so I think if people wanted to do something like this, there's interest out there and you don't necessarily have to do it in the same way in terms of having a, we decided on an in-person event, it was a day and a half. You can just as easily do this in Zoom with breakout rooms and find different ways to do it. You don't have to have big catered events. You can do things more low key. But that opportunity to talk through challenges. And also the other piece I was going to add is that we very specifically made sure that our participants were also hearing from researchers. So, most of the actual attendees were people who work in libraries, work in the office of research, work in IT, whether that's the central campus IT or our faculty computing, but the people we're serving are our researchers.

Alison Hitchens:

And so we really consciously made sure we had a researcher panel where the researchers were talking to us about what they're doing with research data management or some of the challenges they made. And we very specifically made sure we had a voice around indigenous research and indigenous data sovereignty. So that's part of the picture too. So I think the other takeaway is to just be intentional about, I guess, the experience you want your participants to have and the types of things that you think it's important for them to be thinking about and talking about as well.

Gerry Bayne:

Is there anything else that you'd like to share in terms of this project or RDM in general that you've been thinking about?

Alison Hitchens:

One of the things we're trying to work on now, we had all this input from this event and we're working on some sort of paper, we don't know what to call it yet, a discussion paper report, something will come out of it, but trying to bring together some of these ideas and some recommendations so people can watch for that. We'll, eventually I think we're aiming for the fall to have that out. I think it's really important also for those folks that aren't aware of the Canadian context, that it's been really important for us as a community that we have a lot of tools available that we're not having to reinvent at our institution. So, I mentioned that University of Alberta hosts at a data management planning assistant, the DMP assistant at the national level, the Alliance hosts two different data repositories FRDR and Borealis. They've worked on a data discovery system LUNARIS and the ability to have some of those systems in place, that means we at Waterloo don't have to build or Guelph or Toronto that we can make use of those. So building that strong community so we can collaborate where it makes sense, and then just focus more on some of our local issues. I think that's been a really important part. We haven't solved it all. There's lots of stuff to do, so many challenges, but I think that's really a good foundation for us to work on.

Gerry Bayne:

On. And that's what I love about academia. You guys aren't trying to steal each other's trade secrets. You're actually sharing knowledge and building things so you can collect that knowledge and solve problems. Thank you. That's great. If there's anything else you'd like to add about this event?

Alison Hitchens:

I guess the only thing, we're trying to encourage people to pick it up, and we are not necessarily in a position right now to host another event, but we're happy to share all the information, all of our planning, anything that helps someone else plan their own event to feel free to reach out to any of us that were involved. I don't know if I mentioned the names of some of the organizations that helped us, but in addition to University of Calgary and University of Ottawa, OCLC research participated, Compute Ontario participated the Alliance, and we had a representation from SSHRCas well. So it really is something that you can kind of build that build community, not in terms of the participations, but also in terms of how to run some of these events, and it doesn't have to be taken all on by yourself.

Gerry Bayne:

That's great. Well, I noticed the link for the event in your summary, and I'll add that to the show notes so people kind of see what the program was and see what was going on and get in touch with you if they'd like. So thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.

Alison Hitchens:

Thank you.

Gerry Bayne:

That was Alison Hitchens from the University of Waterloo. And I'm Gerry Bayne for EDUCAUSE. Thanks for listening.

 

 

Note: Alison would also like to acknowledge the Canadian Association of Research Libraries who also supported the event.