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.
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.