Journal:Data management: New tools, new organization, and new skills in a French research institute
| Full article title | Data management: New tools, new organization, and new skills in a French research institute |
|---|---|
| Journal | LIBER Quarterly |
| Author(s) | Martin, Caroline; Cadiou, Colette; Jannès-Ober, Emmanuelle |
| Author affiliation(s) | National Research Institute of Science and Technology for Environment and Agriculture |
| Primary contact | Email: caroline dot martin at agrenium dot fr |
| Year published | 2017 |
| Volume and issue | 27(1) |
| Page(s) | 73–88 |
| DOI | 10.18352/lq.10196 |
| ISSN | 2213-056X |
| Distribution license | Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International |
| Website | https://www.liberquarterly.eu/articles/10.18352/lq.10196/ |
| Download | https://www.liberquarterly.eu/articles/10.18352/lq.10196/galley/10691/download/ (PDF) |
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Abstract
In the context of e-science and open access, visibility and impact of scientific results and data have become important aspects for spreading information to users and to the society in general. The objective of this general trend of the economy is to feed the innovation process and create economic value. In our institute, the French National Research Institute of Science and Technology for Environment and Agriculture, Irstea, the department in charge of scientific and technical information, with the help of other professionals (scientists, IT professionals, ethics advisors, etc.), has recently developed suitable services for researchers and their data management needs in order to answer European recommendations for open data. This situation has demanded a review of the different workflows between databases, questioning the organizational aspects among skills, occupations, and departments in the institute. In fact, data management involves all professionals and researchers assessing their workflows together.
Keywords: data management, datasets, databases, data publication, skills, services, e-science, open data
Introduction
Irstea, the National Research Institute of Science and Technology for Environment and Agriculture, is a public research institute under the joint supervision of the Ministry of Research and the Ministry of Agriculture in France. Irstea has built a multidisciplinary and systemic approach to three domains: water, environmental technologies and territories, which today form the basis of its strength and originality. The appropriation of scientific results is a very important mission of the institute. It wants to be a link between practitioners and scientists and represents a collaborative space dedicated to the co-construction of knowledge.
With exponential growth and massive data production in all areas of science, management and recovery of data becomes, in the digital age, a crucial issue in technical, scientific and economic policy. These evolutions affect the production and use of scientific information, and consequently they impact on the practices of information professionals at several levels:
- Technical: for the increasingly rapid evolution of software tools, IT infrastructures and practices; and
- Organizational and behavioral: new approaches leading to new modes of production and development of scientific and technical production.
This requires an important adaptation of skills and missions of scientific and technical information (STI) professionals.[1] In fact they are expected to serve more closely the different requirements for data processing, reporting and disseminating.[2] These new missions are quite natural in the continuity of the usual accompanying activities (training and local support) made by librarians from the scientific teams.[3]
At Irstea, STI professionals have developed support services for research projects, which include an involvement in the processes of management and enhancement of scientific data. After the presentation of the external and internal context of Irstea, we present the needs and questions of researchers around the data life cycle.
The new services proposed at the moment are:
- Developing guidelines on data management, archiving and diffusion;
- Managing a quality process on data management (ISO 9000 Quality certification);
- Training sessions and seminars in the institute to share this knowledge and to point out new skills and new transversal working methods. In particular, this involves a management approach in order to support staff for future changes in the skills of librarians in a research institution by building a training plan, and the implementation of an STI operational organization to answer future challenges in the scientific research.
- Developing services such as, e.g., DOI creation, as the development of “IrsteaData” (a catalogue of datasets), an important new part of our data publication system based on a close collaboration between librarians, scientists, technicians, IT professionals, lawyers etc.;
- Working on our vocabularies: as we have opened our institutional repository (CemOA), we are working on the mapping of our referentials, with major vocabularies for all our research products (we're currently mapping our Irstea thesaurus with Agrovoc and Gemet thesauri, and we plan to use Orcid and Geonames also).
These new services have brought the different workflows into question, especially for the deposit process of data publication and the management of the interoperability between the databases of the institute. Establishing the link between data, publications and other scientific or technical productions (reports, etc.) related to the same research project has meant adopting another point of view about the management of the information system and involving the whole staff in a transversal project about their skills and roles in the scientific process.
We will see how STI professionals are now able to play a pivotal role in the management of data in relation to the other actors involved. STI services will be presented within their place in the data management systems. Finally, we will highlight the leading role of STI professionals in a process of evolution of the interoperability between the various resources of the scientific information system of Irstea.
References
- ↑ American Library Association (2014). "The State of America's Libraries: A Report from the American Library Association" (PDF). American Libraries. pp. 79. http://www.ala.org/news/sites/ala.org.news/files/content/2014-State-of-Americas-Libraries-Report.pdf. Retrieved 18 November 2016.
- ↑ MacMillan, D. (2014). "Data Sharing and Discovery: What Librarians Need to Know". The Journal of Academic Librarianship 40 (5): 541–549. doi:10.1016/j.acalib.2014.06.011.
- ↑ Schmidt, B.; Shearer, K. (June 2016). "Librarians' Competencies Profile for Research Data Management" (PDF). pp. 7. https://www.coar-repositories.org/files/Competencies-for-RDM_June-2016.pdf. Retrieved 18 November 2016.
Notes
This presentation is faithful to the original, with only a few minor changes to presentation. In some cases important information was missing from the references, and that information was added. The original article lists references alphabetically, but this version — by design — lists them in order of appearance.
