The 100-page report presents data on the data curation practices of 22 academic and research library data curation programs, primarily those of major research-oriented universities. The study gives detailed data on personnel, staff time devoted to data curation, budgets, level of cooperation with library data plans by scholars, use of data request management systems, and the role of the library in data oriented facets of work such as discovering datasets, developing metadata for data sets, archiving data and other tasks.
The report also measures the use of plans to help scholars meet data requirements of journal publishers and funding agencies, as well as general information data literacy efforts to help train faculty in data manipulation, storage, retrieval and visualization, including data on use of tutorials, courses, videos, workshops and other means. Survey participants name their best attended or most used vehicle for teaching data management literacy, and comment on the degree of coordination on data management issues with other university or parent organization academic and administrative departments. The report also looks at the library role in training patrons in the use of statistical packages such as R and SAS, among others.
Just a few of the report’s many findings are that:
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Overall, 35.36% of respondents said the amount of staff time spent on data management had stayed about the same over the past two years; for 36.36% it increased, and for 27.27% it increased significantly.
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13.64% of the institutions sampled offered library patrons videos or web-based tutorials on data curation or management.
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18.18% of libraries sampled offered patrons training in the statistical analysis package R.
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Patrons estimated that a mean of 31.67% of the data projects that their libraries customarily deal with concern human subjects or are otherwise sensitive and confidential and require strict distribution monitoring.