Collaborating on Research Data Support - Christina Maimone

This resource first appeared in issue #34 on 24 Jul 2020 and has tags Managing A Team: Data Teams, Managing A Team: Team organization, Strategy: Working across an organization

Collaborating on Research Data Support - Christina Maimone

This is a short and useful “what worked well/what was challenging” overview of three initiatives at Northwestern where Research Computing and the Libraries collaborated on research data support. Both entities have a lot of experience and a lot of resources around research data management, and have greater or lesser amounts of reach with different parts of the University community.

Even though your research computing team and your library may be quite different, I think there’ll be a lot of commonalities here if you’re thinking of trying similar initiatives. The Library has a different natural constituency then Research IT, different means of communicating, acts on different timescales, and has different institutional priorities. But that diversity of audiences, needs, expertises, and strengths can be an advantage if you can figure out how to split responsibilities in a way that meets everyone’s needs. It sounds like Northwestern was on their way to some success with this, although the pandemic has interrupted this work (a lot of the support efforts were built around in-person events.)