I have the honor of writing the inaugural post for our new blog, Research Moment, and introduce you to the Research Partnerships team. First, the blog—we intend for this to be a place where you can come for quick tips and bite-sized information. Each post will be brief, around 500 words, on various topics related to our team’s particular area of expertise, research. While we will provide tips and tricks here, know that you can always reach out to us for more in-depth support on any of these topics and more.
Research Partnerships is a small but mighty unit in University Libraries charged with advanced research support for data and information-intensive research. Currently, we have three areas of strength that are the foundation of what we can do with our crew of six librarians:
- evidence synthesis research strategies,
- research data management and curation,
- and geospatial information systems data and programming.
We offer consultations and training for researchers at every level. We can talk with you about your project, help develop a search strategy or data management plan, or identify geospatial tools for your project. We can also provide training to your project team, lab, or department brown bag. Occasionally, we can extend that consultation to a longer collaboration, depending on the project and its objectives, and a few other factors.
We work primarily with researchers who will be collecting or extracting original data or using secondary data or geospatial data. But those researchers could be faculty, postdocs, graduate students, or undergraduates. Because everyone uses information, we work with researchers in every discipline.
To give you a sense of the scope of our work, here are a few of the things we did in Fall 2023:
- we delivered training on NIH Data Management and Sharing Plans,
reviewed data management plans, - offered presentations about Open Science,
- conducted workshops on ESRI StoryMaps and methodologies for Evidence Synthesis,
- curated datasets for ingest into our local data repository,
and helped graduate students find secondary data for new projects.
We’ll be doing more of this kind of thing, with events open to everyone posted on our Research Data Events calendar. And we’ll be using this blog to share research tips, including information about tools or resources, changes in federal policy, access to databases or computational tools, and occasionally, things we’ve been working on with campus partners.
In our next blog post, we will tell you more about Love Data Week (February 12 through 16) but before then, I want to give you a preview of some activities. We are partnering with Institutional Effectiveness and Analytics to promote the BTAA Data Viz Championship.
UNL will choose a local champion by January 25 to compete against the other BTAA champions on February 16, during Love Data Week. To learn more about the competition, please have a look at this guide. We will also conduct some workshops to help you do a better job of loving your data, no matter your discipline. You’ll find them on our calendar, so have a look.