Building a research data support service from an experiment: the case of the University of Strasbourg

When University of Strasbourg started to develop research data management services in 2014, the Library Services (SBU) conducted a quantitative survey and interviews to find out the needs and practices of researchers. These studies revealed that researchers in the humanities and social sciences needed tools to visualise their data and make them available online.

We therefore set up in 2015 an experimental support service for researchers jointly with the IT department (DNum). We chose 4 pilot projects in the humanities and social sciences as use cases to develop web applications to exploit, describe and disseminate data.

We aimed to:

• Determine what were the most common requests
• Provide the human and technical resources necessary to address them
• Define an adapted service offer
• Size the research data management team within the library and develop the appropriate skills.

From 2015 to 2021, the data librarian was “embedded” in the 4 research teams. The library helped researchers write functional specifications for the applications. We proposed a data model to structure the data. As a result, several databases were developed, including an application that became the backbone of several other projects.

We discovered during this experiment that working with researchers is multifaceted. Not all projects can be supported because some are not sufficiently technically defined. Researchers also have to be available. Therefore, lack of maturity and schedule conflicts can be detrimental to the success of a project. In addition, participating in a software development project is a long-term commitment because of new features and updates. The accumulation of projects supervision is time consuming.

Finally, the library has often gone much further in its activities than originally thought because we have in fact taken on a role of coordination and interface between the various stakeholders that no one had previously assumed. This is especially true with the DNum because a research project is different from an IT development project, and most of the researchers had never worked with IT specialists, while the DNum had never worked with researchers. However, the requests are diverse and can involve other university services.

The need to structure the service in a more robust way became apparent. The first step was to put an end to this experiment by defining a comprehensive and common service offer with the DNum, the Research Data Helpdesk. We now provide data management plans support, advice on repositories, and guidance on metadata standards. The library team strengthened with an additional FTE. The DNum created a service dedicated to research data.

The second step was to structure our organization at the institutional level and with our partners, by grouping all data support services within the university in a « data workshop ». At the end of 2021, the Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation launched an initiative encouraging research institutions to create and certify “data workshops”. This one-stop shop will provide support covering the entire data lifecycle and will bring together all the skills needed to guide, help and train researchers.