Poster presented at the 2019 Special Libraries Association (SLA) annual conference.
Abstract: In 2018, the University of Cincinnati Libraries’ Research & Data Services (RDS) unit unveiled a new Visualization Laboratory (Viz Lab) and expanded service model including data visualization/data analysis. The RDS unit has its roots in STEMM and currently includes informationists, librarians and technical consultants who engages with researchers across all disciplines. The Viz Lab and its associated services are the culmination of several years of planning and implementation. This poster will share lessons learned and good practices with our visualization space and service planning, including considerations for space design, service and training models, staffing and assessment. In addition, this poster will describe the early impact of our efforts, as seen through consultation logs, trainings and campus outreach, space usage and grants activity. We will also reveal some future directions for RDS, including plans to increase integration of the Viz Lab and data visualization/data analysis services into the university’s teaching and research missions.
Acknowledgments: Amy Koshoffer, for creation of the Research & Data Services consultation log dataset and database structure.
This document details our process for creating a service catalog for UC Libraries Research and Data Services and our efforts towards offering data science services. In this document, we identify our gaps in knowledge and expertise while making recommendations for filling these gaps.
The University of Cincinnati (UC) Libraries' Informationist program and Research & Data Services (RDS) unit provide an extensive program of support for the research community. RDS is a highly-integrated unit of UC Libraries, staffed by informationists in the health sciences, sciences, engineering and social sciences and librarians, specialist staff, and student consultants. Our activities infuse across the institution, including the main campus and the Academic Health Center campus, and we oversee innovative spaces that respond to the particular needs of research communities, including informatics, geospatial analysis and data visualization. Since the fall 2015 CNI presentation on the UC Informationists ("New Roles, New Collaborations: Developing an Informationist Program to Support University Research"), we have greatly expanded our partnerships, services and educational offerings. We are now active in data and statistical consulting, collaborations on bioinformatics education, impactful community engagements (e.g., UC Data Day), and deep partnerships with the UC IT unit on initiatives such as the Data & Computational Science Series. At present, we are pursuing a new and challenging vision to realign our work in order to enable the institution's agendas for data science and innovation. We will discuss our experience with scalable growth and other successes in Research & Data Services and our assessment of a future in data science.
During the last three years new leadership at the University of Cincinnati (UC) in many senior administrative positions has resulted in a rare culture of collaboration. This presentation will focus on the dynamic that has evolved among the Dean of Libraries, Vice President for Information Technology, and the Vice President for Research; discuss the development of the Research Hub@UC, which will deliver a profile-based customized suite of programs to researchers and scholars throughout the lifecycle; and explore a specific initiative (Scholar@UC) that demonstrates the depth of collaboration and its impact on the partners’ cultures, particularly the libraries’ at all levels. UC’s research support ecosystem has been disjointed, incomplete, ignored, or simply hidden. To grow the university’s research enterprise, these leaders realized that support programs throughout the research lifecycle had to be improved, expanded, and promoted. Presenters will discuss the successes and challenges of bridging different work cultures, funding development in a fiscally austere environment, and establishing collaborative models for operational support. To demonstrate the value and challenges of the partnership, including its impact on the cultures of each partner, presenters will explore two projects that have been enabled by the partnership, including the aforementioned Research Hub@UC and Scholar@UC, a faculty self-submission repository. Using these as case studies, presenters will discuss how agile (including open source) software development projects and broad system integration needs have enabled the partners to develop nimble, user-driven processes and a strong sense of risk taking to deploy new enterprise-wide systems in an environment of lean staff and resources.
The University of Cincinnati Libraries (UCL) is developing an exciting new team of informationists, specialists in research data services who are a hybrid of outreach/embedded librarian and data librarian, to partner with research faculty and students. UCL recently hired three informationist positions to serve data-generating researchers at UC, and plans to hire another social science informationist in the near future. UC informationists are working on several exciting new projects including the creation of new bioinformatics workshops, partnering with an otolaryngology research team, organizing a geographic information system (GIS) working group and GIS events at UC, and providing research assistance for clinical research teams. In addition, the informationists regularly interact with and serve as members of key governance committees and collaborate with the Offices of Research and Information Technology. The informationist team is also moving two key strategic initiatives forward: the development of formalized research data services and the creation of health informatics support from the Health Sciences Library. Both of these initiatives are helping us to develop models for cross-institutional collaboration.
