Johns Hopkins University Data Management Services: Reviewing Our First Year

Of the growing number of academic libraries helping researchers with data management, Johns Hopkins University has one of the first "full service" infrastructures providing data planning consultation and a repository, JHU Data Archive, built specifically for research data. Although drawing upon the expertise of our partner, the Data Conservancy, we are continually evolving our service model, and testing by trial its sustainability and accommodation of diverse practices among disciplines. We will report on the first year of our Data Management Services program, focusing on planning support for NSF's data management plan requirements, and the particular needs of social science. We have developed tools, such as a questionnaire and in-person meetings, for helping researchers with NSF's 2-page plan, and project management workflows for depositing data into the JHU Data Archive. We will discuss outreach strategies for publicizing our services, and incentives for researchers to invest in data preservation and sharing. Case examples from working with a range of social sciences illustrate data management issues distinct from "big data" sciences, such as sharing data with personal identifiers, managing qualitative research, and multi-disciplinary collaborations. With data management requirements expanding among funders, innovations by academic libraries are of broad interest to data curation professionals.