Research Data Management Training Kit for Librarians

EDINA and the Data Library, University of Edinburgh, are pleased to announce the public release of the Do-It-Yourself Research Data Management Training Kit for Librarians, under a CC-BY licence.

The training kit is designed to contain everything needed for librarians in small groups to get themselves up to speed on five key topics in research data management, with or without expert speakers.

The kit is a package of materials used by the Data Library in facilitating Research Data Management (RDM) training with a small group of librarians at the University of Edinburgh over the winter of 2012-2013. The aim was to reuse the MANTRA course developed by the Data Library for early career researchers in a blended learning approach for academic liaison librarians.

The training comprises five two-hour face-to-face sessions. These open with short talks followed by group exercises from the UK Data Archive and long discussions, in a private collegiate setting. Emphasis is placed on facilitation and individual learning rather than long lectures and passive listening. MANTRA modules are used as reading assignments, and reflective writing questions are designed to help librarians ‘put themselves in the shoes of the researcher’. Learning is reinforced and put into practice through an independent study assignment of completing and publishing an interview with a researcher using the Data Curation Profile framework developed by D2C2 at Purdue University Libraries.

• datalib.edina.ac.uk/mantra/libtraining.html