2019 Charleston Library Conference

For the last decade academic libraries have talked with each other and with potential partners about their roles in helping to manage research data and their plans to expand or initiate research data services (RDS). This is driven by mandates from funders, government agencies, and publishers to make research data accessible. The academic researchers served by libraries often do not know about the management and curation side of research data—including writing data management plans, finding data repositories, or describing data using appropriate metadata standards. These are all services that libraries can or do provide, but the range and maturity of research data services from libraries varies considerably. In summer 2019, our team surveyed a sample of academic libraries of all sizes who are members of the Association of College and Research Libraries to find out about their current RDS and plans for the future. This study is a follow-up to surveys of this same group in 2012 and 2015, when we discovered that most offered were informational services similar to traditional library reference services and, while some research libraries are leaders in RDS, many of the non-research libraries that had planned to offer a range of RDS had not yet been able to, often due to lack of resources or shifting priorities. From the 2019 survey we will talk about range of RDS now offered in all sizes of academic libraries, which types of RDS are more popular or practical, and how academic libraries can get started with research data services.