Research data services RDSs in academic libraries have been devel-oped in recent years, and changed according to researchers’ needs and the cur-rent situation.. In this study, staff job
Trang 1Libraries in the USA
Min Jiang, Xinyu Ma, Emi Ishita [0000-0002-1398-8906], and Yukiko Watanabe
Kyushu University, Fukuoka 819-0395, Japan jiang.min.427@s.kyushu-u.ac.jp
Abstract Research data services (RDSs) in academic libraries have been
devel-oped in recent years, and changed according to researchers’ needs and the cur-rent situation In this study, staff job titles in RDSs in academic libraries in the USA were examined to understand the knowledge and skills that are required for RDSs The Web pages of 130 RDSs’ in academic libraries in the USA that were classified as very high research activity by the Carnegie Basic Classifica-tion in 2018 were considered As the results of 98 RDSs in 126 libraries showed, the average number of staff was 3.77 Thirty-five libraries (35.7%) had only one staff member and nine libraries had 10 or more staff The job titles were categorized, and the top three categories were “Research data service”,
“Technology”, and “Geographic information” In half of the libraries, staff with job titles related to RDSs and staff with job titles not related to RDSs were working together in the same RDSs This result indicates that many staff in var-ious subjects are involved in RDSs Compared with the prevvar-ious studies the re-sults showed that the RDSs are being enhanced and are constantly changing
Keywords: Job Title, Research Data Service, Academic Library.
With the emergence of eScience that unifies theory, experiment, and simulation [1], research data has become important Since 2003, the National Institutes of Health has required researchers to submit a final research data sharing plan [2] Since 2011, the National Science Foundation has required researchers to submit a data management plan [3] Other federal agencies, such as the Department of Energy, also require the submission of data management plans [4] In reaction to these requirements, many li-braries have started to provide support services for data management plans [5] Ini-tially, data management plan support was the main focus, but various types of support have been developed in recent years, for example, for data deposit, publishing and sharing, or providing data methodology training
Research has been conducted to understand the status of research data services (RDSs) in academic libraries Si et al [6] examined 87 university library websites As
a result, 50 out of 87 libraries had RDSs in 2012 The SPEC survey (SPEC Kit 334) [5] examined research data management (RDM) services, including RDM and data archiving at 125 Association of Research Libraries (ARL) members Tenopir et al [7,
Trang 28] conducted two online surveys to investigate RDSs in academic libraries in the USA and Canada in 2011 and 2014 Yoon et al [9] examined RDM services in 185 aca-demic university library websites in the USA in 2015 They found that libraries pro-vided data management planning, data consultation, data publishing and sharing, data deposit, data methodology, and help/ask librarians as services In 2016, Yu [10] found that 63 libraries had RDSs, which is 12.3% (nine libraries) higher than that in the SPEC survey In 2018, Yoon et al [11] conducted an online survey to examine data curation service capacity in academic and public libraries, which were randomly se-lected in the USA Among the respondents, 40.4% (46 out of 114) academic libraries had a data curation service
RDSs provided in academic libraries have been developed over many years In this study, we focus on who works for RDSs We examine people’s job titles in RDSs The job title would be a measurement that expresses the specific RDSs roles of staff
It is possible to know what knowledge and skills are required for RDSs by examining job titles We examined the job titles of staff who currently work in RDSs from uni-versity library websites using the same method as Yoon et al [9] In this paper, we show the results of the number of staff in RDSs in each academic library, distribution
of the job title categories, and collaboration based on job titles obtained from 126 aca-demic university libraries in the USA
2.1 Sample
We assume that academic libraries in research universities provide advanced RDSs Investigating RDSs in those universities is useful for understanding the most ad-vanced RDSs Therefore, for our survey, we selected all 130 universities that were classified as doctoral universities - very high research activity (R1) by the Carnegie Basic Classification in 2018 [12]
2.2 Identification of RDSs
We identified the “research data service (RDS)” on the Web pages of each academic library using the following procedure We searched each academic library’s website using the university name as keywords, and then searched the Web pages on the li-brary’s website that displayed the keywords “data curation,” “research data curation,”
“data management,” “research data management,” “data service,” or “research data service.” These keywords were extracted from Yoon et al [9] According to our defi-nition, a library provides a RDS if it has these Web pages
2.3 Identification of Job Titles and the Number of Staff
When we examine people who work for RDSs, we are not able to identify their job status, such as librarian, specialist, and staff In this paper, we refer to anyone who works for an RDS as staff Additionally, we are not able to identify full-time or
Trang 3part-time workers, or those who work only for RDSs or for several divisions We assume that all staff are full-time workers and work only for RDSs
We recorded the number of staff and their job titles for each RDS in the libraries Some Web pages only showed the staff names, not their job titles If there was no job title for a staff member, we recorded the job title as “unknown.” Two RDSs displayed only job titles and no staff names For example, the University of Oregon Libraries displayed “contact the map & aerial photography/GIS librarian,” but no personal names [13] For these two RDSs, we recorded the job titles and assumed that the num-ber of staff was one person Some RDSs also referred to subject librarians and liaison librarians For example, the University of Iowa Libraries referred to subject librarians
on the Web page as follows: “For in-depth assistance in finding research data in your research discipline, please contact your Subject Specialist Librarian or contact us” [14] Because it was difficult to identify the number of these staff, we did not include them as staff for RDSs However, we counted the number of libraries referred to sub-ject/liaison librarians
2.4 Inter-coder Agreement
Before the start of the survey, we tested the inter-coder reliability in two rounds The first and second authors coded (recorded job titles) for 10 libraries randomly selected from 130 libraries, and the agreement rate was 60% in the first round In the second round, they coded 10 different libraries and the agreement rate was 95% It reached a sufficient agreement rate Then, the first author coded the remainder of the sample from September 25 to October 1, 2020
The two coders discussed each result that contained disagreement cases and then obtained the results with agreements for 20 libraries used for the test We included these results with agreement in our survey results
3.1 Number of Staff in RDSs
In 130 academic libraries, 126 libraries (96.9%) had RDS Web pages and 98 out of
126 RDSs displayed staff information There was a total 369 staff in 98 RDSs and 3.77 staff on average The maximum number of staff was 17 and the median was two Figure 1 shows the number of staff in the RDSs Thirty-five libraries (35.7%) had only one staff member and 18 libraries (18.4%) had only two staff More than half of the RDSs were run by one or two staff By contrast, nine RDSs had 10 or more staff, which accounted for only 9.2%
In the online survey in 2012 conducted by Antell et al [15], among the 153 re-sponses from 116 university libraries in the ARL members, 41.1% libraries had one to five employees and 15.9% libraries had six or more employees in data management support In our results, 77.6% (76) libraries had one to five staff and 22.4% (22) li-braries had six or more staff It could be said that the current human resources of RDS are enhanced than demonstrated in the survey in 2012
Trang 4Fig 1 Number of staff in RDSs in 98 libraries.
3.2 Reference to Subject Librarian and Liaison Librarian
Some divisions referred to subject librarians or liaison librarians Among 98 libraries,
23 libraries referred to subject librarians and/or liaison librarians This result indicates that many staff are involved in RDSs, even if they do not belong to RDSs This en-ables users to obtain richer services that associate various subjects Additionally, 28 libraries did not display the personal names and job titles of staff; however, six re-ferred to subject/liaison librarians
3.3 Distribution of Job Title Categories
We categorized the job titles First, we performed several procedures The exact ex-pressions of the job titles that we recorded were very different We excluded staff in the following three cases: (1) 15 staff job titles that expressed only the job level, such
as “director,” “associate librarian,” or “professor;” 2) 10 staff job titles that were com-binations of the office/center name and/or job level, such as “assistant director, sci-ence & engineering libraries” or “director, copyright & digital scholarship center;” and 3) 20 staff job titles that were “unknown,” as we defined previously Hence, 45 staff were excluded from the count for these three cases
We also modified names according to three additional criteria First, 118 staff job titles contained not only a subject but also a job level We deleted the job level For example, if the job title was “program head for data management services,” we only recorded “data management service.” Second, we deleted job types such as “librarian” and “specialist.” Hence, we recorded “data management librarian” and “data
Trang 5manage-ment specialist” as “data managemanage-ment.” Third, we unified symbols and plural/singular forms, such as "services" and "service," and “&” and “and.”
After we completed these procedures, there were 324 staff and 167 unique job ti-tles We categorized these modified job titi-tles For example, we categorized job titles containing data, research data, data management, or research as “Research Data Ser-vice.” We categorized job titles containing technology, engineer, computer, or system
as “Technology.” Some job titles contained keywords that belonged to two or more categories, and we categorized these as associated categories For example, we cate-gorized the job title “research, science, engineer” as “Research data service,” “Sci-ence,” and “Technology.”
Many job titles were related to RDSs Additionally, we did not observe major spe-cific subjects; they were very diverse Many librarians in various subjects were in-volved in RDSs; that is, they were expected to provide RDSs in various subjects, al-though this depended on the schools in the universities
Focusing on a specific subject, geographic information is ranked in the top 3 in Ta-ble 1 This indicates that geographic information has become important for RDSs in recent years The SPEC survey [5] examined RDM service staff in 73 academic li-braries and found that 12 out of 231 positions were titles in GIS/geospatial
Technology is ranked in the top 2 It can be said that researchers also need support for technology skills in RDSs Tenopir et al [8] mentioned that libraries need to have technologically skilled staff or increase opportunities for technology training for their existing staff
Trang 6Category Distribution
Ratio
Distribu-tion Ratio
Analysis and
3.4 Collaboration in RDSs in Each Academic Library
We examined what types of job titles staff have at each RDS In Table 2, “Others” represents the number of libraries where staff only have job titles not related to RDSs, such as “health science.” “RDS” represents the number of libraries where staff only have job titles relating to RDSs “RDS & Others” represents the number of libraries where staff have both RDS job titles and Others An example of a staff job title is “en-gineering, data curation.” Another example is “scholarly engagement, physical sci-ence, data management.” “RDS & Others, Others” means that staff that have both RDS and Others job titles and staff with Others job titles works in the same RDS Seventy-five libraries (76.5%) had staff with job titles relating to RDSs at least However, few libraries had staff that only had job titles related to RDSs (20.4%) By
Trang 7contrast, 22 libraries (“Others”, 22.4%) had staff that only had job titles not related to RDSs We assumed that these libraries were developing the environment for RDSs and asked for the cooperation of staff from other services
Table 2 Collaboration based on the job title category in RDSs.
N = 98
RDSs have more staff than before Staff in various job titles is involved in RDS, in-cluding technology and specific subjects This indicates that RDSs are being en-hanced and are constantly changing according to the social environment and the de-velopment of technology
In this survey, we only examined staff job titles We plan to investigate actual ser-vices and information provided in the RDS Web pages in academic libraries The SPEC survey [5] was a comprehensive survey in 2013 The study by Yoon et al [9] showed the recent status of actual services in RDSs We plan to compare our results and their results to understand how to enhance RDSs in academic libraries in the USA These results could be useful for designing future RDSs, not only the USA, but also other countries
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