A colleague drew my attention today to the service being offered by the MIT Libraries, namely, to help MIT faculty and researchers manage and publish their data – see http://libraries.mit.edu/guides/subjects/data-management/index.html. I did wonder for a moment whether this was a case of the old data/information conundrum but no, they really do mean data, and they’re not talking in terms merely of research papers.
Interestingly, MIT Libraries don’t claim to provide all the necessary resources, but to describe them, giving links to established national data repositories, for example - an approach that would fit nicely with the umbrella solution described in the UKRDS interim report (accessible from http://www.ukrds/ac.uk).
I’d be interested to know how many of the UK’s university libraries are offering resources for managing research data throughout their lifecycle – or even how many have plans to offer that service. Or is everyone awaiting the outcomes from the UKRDS study before making a commitment?
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Graham, I came across this MIT service provided by the Library a few weeks ago and I got in touch with them to get further information. Katherine McNeil is responsible for this "new service" but as she explained to me, those webpages are to make explicit a set of services that several librarians have been doing with their faculties for some time now.
Katherine also described how these activities helping researchers to manage their data from the moment of creation is the logical evolution of the traditional data library services provided to social scientists to locate and use data.
As you know, in the UK there are a few data libraries (see www.disc-uk.org) and we are currently working to help researchers manage their data but wouldn't it be great if there were more of them.
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