Terrence Bennett was visiting the Li Ka Shing Library at Singapore Management University for 2 months to study the need for data services at SMU. He gave a talk about data services to SMU library staff and LAS members on 25 March 2010. About 52 people attended the session held at the Reading Room in the Li Ka Shing Library.

About Terry

Terry is currently the Business & Economics Librarian at the College of New Jersey (TCNJ).  TCNJ Library has 13 professional librarians of which 10 are in the public services. He previously worked at Goizueta Business Library at Emory University and the Commerce Library at University of Illinois. He has an MBA and is a CPA with over 10 years experience in corporate taxation. His first degree was in anthropology and worked at National Geographic as a proof reader.

Data Services

Terry introduced the various service models for data services:

• Finding / acquiring / providing access to datasets
• Assisting with statistical analysis
• Creating guidelines for data management
• Curating data

He highlighted some data services in American libraries: Emory University Electronic Data Center, Duke University Data and GIS Services and Michigan State University Data Services. He gave special mention to some Canadian examples of data centres that were highly evolved: University of Waterloo Electronic Data Service, University of British Columbia Data Services, University of Toronto Data Library Service, and University of Saskatchewan Data & GIS Library Services

In Asia, the institutional repository has been set up to be able to take in data collected by the researchers at Hong Kong University of Science & Technology (HKUST) as reported by Wong (2009).

He mentioned some data services that were outside libraries: Cornell University CISER,  California Digital Library, UK Data Archive and Australian National Data Service.

Terry reported that there were no best practices for data services (Bennett & Nicholson, 2004). He also found that (Bennett & Nicholson, 2007) that it was not easy for users to discern the presence of data services in libraries and their websites and the services needed for the manipulation and analysis of these sources. In the United States there has been a big push for data and research to be freely available to the public when it has been funded by the government. This has helped to advance the culture of open access data but the willingness to archive data varied depending on subject and stage that the researcher was at. For example, faculty with “hot” marketing data and young faculty who have yet to publish their research would be less willing to share their data. Faculty who were well established in their fields were more willing to share the data they had collected.

In his project at SMU, the objectives are:

• Understand current use of research data
• Assess unmet needs and anticipated future needs
• Benchmark against peer institutions
• Make recommendations about data management and data curation at SMU

Terry had been talking to SMU faculty and graduate students about data services and what they need. He had a range of responses ranging from “What are data services?” to  “I want data services now!”.  When he asked about how they stored their data, he found that some who were not sure where they had saved the data and some who said the data needed to be cleaned up first. Some faculty felt that the data they need was specific to them and had used their own research funds to purchase the data.

In his survey of SMU graduate students (a sample size of 56), when asked what data they had created to support their research, 36% used numeric data and 21% used the results from experiments and 17% had not created data.  When asked what type of data they have acquired to support their research, 38% used free data, 37% used library subscribed data, while 4% purchased data using their own funds and 3% purchased data using research grant. When asked if they would reuse the data, 45% thought the data would be used for additional projects and 29% thought the data also may be of interest to other researchers in future.

Terry planned to speak to more SMU faculty and graduate students to get a more accurate picture. He would be preparing a report for SMU and he also plans to present his findings at IASSIST.

For some final points on data services, Terry answered the question of where do data librarians come from? Some library schools like University of Illinois and University of North Carolina are creating new tracks for data curation and digital curation. Other institutions like Digital Curation Centre and ICPSR provide training on handling data. Specialised journals have appeared like International Journal of Digital Curation and D-Lib Magazine had a special issue on cyberinfrastructure, data, and libraries.

In the Q&A session, questions were asked about copyright of data. Terry was frank and said that there were no clear cut answers. He referred to University of Waterloo warning on usage of data. He also referred to QUT’s guidelines for data management. When asked whether he saw a difference between libraries that provided data services and those that did not, he felt it was more a question of whether there was an awareness of data services and user expectations. At TCNJ, faculty were not clamoring for data services and they did not come to the library for data they need. He felt that there was a need for libraries to create the awareness for data services and that  centralising data purchases in the library would help to eliminate duplication and use funding more effectively. He also identified the difference between a reference librarian and a data services librarian as one who had a PhD and one who was experienced at using and manipulating data.

Emotional Toxicity

Over drinks at a conference, Terry got interested in emotional toxicity in libraries together with Mary Freier and Ann Riley. They created a survey and invited people to respond. To their surprise, they received over 3,000 responses. They included questions about gender, competition, communication, seriousness of the problem, and persistence of the problem.

Based on the responses to the survey, they presented some case studies of toxic situations at the ACRL Conference in 2007 and 2009.

Here is one such case study:

Case of Randy Reserves: Another teaching assistant from the School of Communications called, wanting to put a whole book on electronic reserves. Calm and experienced, sometimes relaxed to the point of being sedentary, Randy Reserves, the unit supervisor, explained for the umpteenth time that morning that guidelines were posted on the library website, and that only a certain amount of text could be made available online. The twenty-something TA said, “You people over there are relics! Don’t you know everything’s on the internet anyway? Why do I bother?” and hung up.

Sam Student walked into Randy’s office just as the conversation ended. He asked for the rest of the day off to work on two big class assignments. Sam was Randy’s only help, and this was a busy time, but Randy always told students to put classes first. “Sure, no problem,” Randy said, and Sam took off. Randy stood up and walked toward the break room. Just before he got there, Carrie Capable, the library director, appeared from behind him. She was young, an amateur triathlete who always seemed to move fast. “Randy, can I talk to you a minute? I understand you’ve been doing this a long time, but I’ve had another complaint about rudeness from your staff to a faculty member in Communications, and they were really unhappy about a lack of flexibility in our policies. Could you get together a group to re-examine those policies? And talk to your staff about customer service? We have to be responsive.” Randy nodded and said, “Sure, I’ll call you.” Fortunately, she scurried on to her next meeting (or 5-K lunch-time run).

They asked the following questions about the case:

1. What is the source of toxicity?
2. What is the main issue to be addressed?
3. How would you address it?

By studying the situations which were causing distress to library staff, we can begin the understand them and can then work on coming up with creative solutions to toxic situations and unique behaviors related to competition for jobs, promotions, and limited resources.

References

Bennett, T., & Nicholson, S. (2007). Research libraries: Connecting users to numeric and spatial resources. Social Science Computer Review, 25(3), 302-318.

Bennett, T., & Nicholson, S. (2004). Interactions between the academic business library and research data services. portal: Libraries & the Academy, 4(1), 105-122.

Nicholson, S. & Bennett, T. (2009). Transparent practices: Primary and secondary data in business ethics dissertations. Journal of Business Ethics, 84(3), 417-425.

Wong, G. K. W. (2009). Exploring research data hosting at the HKUST Institutional Repository. Serials Review, 35(3): 125-132.

Contributed by Yeo Pin Pin