Data for Everyone: A Collaborative, Skill-Oriented Model for Engaging the Community

The motto for Data Services at the University of Rochester’s Libraries is that “Data is for everyone”. To facilitate this, staff offer a variety of support to engage the entire university community. Instead of subscribing to a subject-specific model, members of Data Services cover the entire research data lifecycle by specializing in different skills. First, a Data Librarian reviews data management and sharing plans, offers guidance on data management and sharing best practices and federal funders, and leads data literacy initiatives. A Reproducibility Librarian supports the next section of the lifecycle for processing, analyzing and sharing works openly in a reproducible way through electronic laboratory notebooks, coding, data visualization, APIs, etc. Finally, a Data Curator closes the lifecycle by administrating the institutional repository and assisting researchers with curation and preservation. Our service, by being skill-oriented and discipline-agnostic, allows us to support all disciplines.It is our marketing strategy, however, that ensures we reach the full community. While we utilize the normal gamut of marketing strategies such as newsletters, flyers, and listserv emails, the key to our outreach is offering public educational opportunities. From an annual data visualization contest to a wide array of workshops for both discipline-specific and discipline-agnostic skills, we promote awareness of our service for researchers across the university. An increase in consultations and tickets often follows an event, and we can launch a new service by hosting a related workshop. We also employ students to reach out to more departments and clubs across the university.In this presentation, we will discuss the unique strategies that shape our offerings to reinforce that the Libraries Data Services serve everyone at the university. We will further reflect on the strengths and challenges over the first year and half of the model and explore next steps to better serve our community.