Reflections on a New RDM Course

By Elena Azadbakht, MSI, University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg

I recently had the opportunity to participate in the inaugural Biomedical & Health Research Data Management for Librarians (mostly) online course, sponsored by the NLM and NNLM Training Office. I am one of about thirty librarians enrolled in the eight-week Moodle course, the online component of which concluded during the first week of March. Each module focused on a different aspect of research data management:

• RDM Overview & Data Lifecycle
• Data Curation & Documentation
• Data Standards, Taxonomies, & Ontologies
• Data Security, Storage, & Preservation
• Data Sharing & Publishing
• Data Management Plans
• Data Wrangling
• RDM at Your Institution

My library is only just starting to offer a suite of research data management services, so I was looking for a learning experience that would provide a solid overview of RDM from a librarian’s perspective and that involved hands-on practice. This course definitely met my requirements. Each week brought together learning material from a variety of sources, discussion prompts, and assignments. The assignments helped us put into practice what we had learned that week. During the week on data management plans, for instance, we had to use the DMPTool to create a DMP based on one of two case studies. The data wrangling module involved using OpenRefine to clean up a publicly available dataset.

The final component is a capstone project and a two-day Summit, which will take place at the NLM in early April. This will give us participants, as well as instructors and mentors, a chance to meet one another. We have a good amount of flexibility with the capstone project so that our efforts support the specific RDM needs we’re encountering locally. For example, I’m creating a LibGuide on RDM. Although we have until August to complete our capstone projects, I’m hoping to have mine done by the time of the Summit. (I can’t pass up the opportunity to get feedback from my colleagues!) Each course participant was assigned a mentor (a librarian with some RDM expertise) who could help us decide on and think through an appropriate capstone project.

If you’re interested in RDM and feel like you’d benefit from an opportunity like this one, keep an eye out for future iterations of the course. I highly recommend it!