CARL Faculty Surveys: Aggregate Report of Findings / Résultat de l\u27enquête menée par l\u27association des bibliothèques de recerche du Canada sur le corps professoral de 11 universités canadiennes

Résultats du sondage en anglais et en français mené auprès du corps professorale de 11 universités canadiennes par l\u27association des bibliothèques de recherche du Canada. (ABRC

UK survey of academics 2015

Research is changing. New technology brings increased computational power and virtual representation of physical objects, allowing us to pose and answer previously unimaginable research questions. Big data can be mixed, linked and mined to reveal new unsuspected connections. Enhanced connectivity allows us to collaborate beyond traditional geographic and disciplinary boundaries. Funders demand greater demonstration of impact and engagement with non-academic communities and audiences. As research changes, so do researchers. Their behaviour and expectations shift, evolving to take advantage of new opportunities or responding to changing requirements from their funders or institutions. The researcher of today works in a very different environment to that of even just 20 years ago. Those, either on or above campus, whose role it is to support researchers need to understand these changes, adapt the services they offer to new requirements and anticipate future changes. In an ideal world they would even develop these services before the researchers realised they needed them! This report is the second Ithaka S+R/ Jisc / RLUK survey of UK academics. It asks of the UK research community their views on resource discovery, their use of these resources (online and digital), attitudes to research data management, and much more. It provides a powerful insight into how researchers view their own behaviour and the research environment within the UK today

The Most Vital Statistics: Finding and Analyzing Historical Mortality Rates

This book chapter describes a hands-on data literacy instruction session designed for a US economic history undergraduate course. The session aims to teach students to find, critically analyze, and contextualize secondary data related to historical urban mortality rates in the United States. Students learn how to use a spreadsheet application (e.g., Excel) to interrogate historical trends in several major US cities and how to use library tools to discover supplementary sources to help explain trends that arise

Knowledge Syntheses Search Strategy Repositories: Canadian Case Studies

Knowledge synthesis research is central to evidence-based medicine. The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses literature search extension (PRISMA-S) outlines full reporting of the search strategy component including uploading documentation of all search strategies into a data repository to increase accessibility, transparency, and reproducibility. In response to the PRISMA-S recommendations, Canadian universities and health care institutions have been increasingly offering local services for librarians to support depositing and sharing search strategies in a digital data repository on the Borealis platform. Borealis, the Canadian Dataverse Repository, is a bilingual, multidisciplinary, secure, Canadian research data repository which supports open discovery, management, sharing, and preservation of Canadian research data. We argue that knowledge synthesis searches are data, and therefore, deserve a place in data repositories. Three case studies of knowledge synthesis repositories from three institutions will be presented: McGill University, Université de Montréal teaching hospitals, and the Health Sciences Information Consortium (HSIC) which includes the University of Toronto and affiliated hospitals. This talk will discuss the reasons for choosing a data repository, decisions made, challenges encountered, and lessons learned

It Takes a Researcher to Know a Researcher: Academic Librarian Perspectives Regarding Skills and Training for Research Data Support in Canada

Objective – This empirical study aims to contribute qualitative evidence on the perspectives of data-related librarians regarding the necessary skills, education, and training for these roles in the context of Canadian academic libraries. A second aim of this study is to understand the perspectives of data-related librarians regarding the specific role of the MLIS in providing relevant training and education. The definition of a data-related librarian in this study includes any librarian or professional who has a conventional title related to a field of data librarianship (i.e., research data management, data services, GIS, data visualization, data science) or any other librarian or professional whose duties include providing data-related services within an academic institution. Methods – This study incorporates in-depth qualitative empirical evidence in the form of 12 semi-structured interviews of data-related librarians to investigate first-hand perspectives on the necessary skills required for such positions and the mechanisms for acquiring and maintaining such skills. Results – The interviews identified four major themes related to the skills required for library-related data services positions, including the perceived importance of experience conducting original research, proficiency in computational coding and quantitative methods, MLIS-related skills such as understanding metadata, and the ability to learn new skills quickly on the job. Overall, the implication of this study regarding the training from MLIS programs concerning data-related librarianship is that although expertise in metadata, documentation, and information management are vital skills for data-related librarians, the MLIS is increasingly less competitive compared with degree programs that offer a greater emphasis on practical experience working with different types of data in a research context and implementing a variety of methodological approaches. Conclusion – This study demonstrates that an in-depth qualitative portrait of data-related librarians within a national academic ecosystem provides valuable new insights regarding the perceived importance of conducting original empirical research to succeed in these roles

Intro to Data Management and Sharing (Alisa Rod, 2023-09-05)

Good data management is the cornerstone of Open and Reproducible Science. First, well-organized and documented data makes it so much easier for you and others to work on your data (do you think you could quickly do additional analyses that reviewers ask for, several months after submitting a publication? Do you think a future trainee in the lab could make sense of your data five years after you are gone?). Secondly, there is no point in sharing messy data that no one ca make sense of or re-use, making good data management and the F.A.I.R principles (you don’t know what this is? great, read-on!) crucial for data sharing and Open Science.</p

Ithaka S+R US Faculty Survey 2015

The Ithaka S+R US Faculty Survey has tracked the changing research, teaching, and information usage practices of faculty members since the early days of the digital transformation. In this sixth triennial cycle, we survey a random sample of US higher education faculty members, adding medical scholars to our population to provide even more comprehensive coverage of US higher education. Our first look at medical faculty members in the 2015 cycle shows that respondents sometimes have attitudes and practices that parallel their colleagues in the social sciences and physical sciences, but often are unique in the way that they discover and access information, conduct and disseminate research, teach, and use the library. Of note, medical respondents are the most likely to agree strongly that the role librarians play at their own institution is becoming much less important (37%). Given levels of response to the survey, findings can be analyzed by discipline, institution type, and other demographic characteristics. The key findings below highlight many of the most notable results from the 2015 Faculty Survey. Key findings » Discovery starting points remain in flux. After faculty members expressed strongly preferring starting their research with a specific electronic research resource/database as compared to other starting points in previous cycles of this survey, they are now reporting being equally as likely to begin with a general purpose search engine as they are with a specific electronic research resource/database. Furthermore, the online library website/catalog has become increasingly important for conducting research since the previous cycle of the survey. » Interest in supporting students and their competencies and learning outcomes shows signs of surging. Since the previous cycle of the survey, there has been an increase in the share of faculty members who believe that their undergraduate students have poor research skills and a substantial increase in the perceived importance of the role of the library in helping undergraduate students develop research, critical analysis, and information literacy skills. » Faculty members prefer to be self-reliant in their data management and preservation processes. Faculty members tend to favor tools that allow them to manage or preserve their data on their own as opposed to support from other entities within and outside of their college or university. Nearly 90% of respondents organize these data on their own computer. » There is no observable trend towards a format transition for monographs. Faculty members’ preference for using scholarly monographs in various ways in print format rather than digital format has, if anything, increased since the previous cycle of the survey. » Traditional scholarly incentives continue to motivate behaviors around research and its dissemination. Respondents generally believe that more recognition should be awarded for traditional research publications, such as journal articles and books, as compared to research products, such as data, images, media, and blog posts. And respondents performing research are most interested in reaching scholars in their specific subdiscipline or field of research and most frequently share their findings in peer-reviewed journals and published conference proceedings, consistent with findings with the previous cycle of the survey

High impact journal article data

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