2016 Charleston Library Conference

Is your library asked to buy data? The conversation around Research Data Management largely focuses on preserving researchers' data output, but libraries also have an important role to play earlier in the data life cycle to help researchers discover and acquire data of all kinds. Many data sets are available for purchase and the library provides a service to the organization by purchasing and making data available to support research.

In this presentation an E-acquisitions Librarian, a Data Librarian and a Social Sciences Subject Librarian will offer best practices for developing data collections in libraries, considering questions of scope, use, hosting, access, and licensing. Time and money are limited, making it important to make data collection development decisions wisely. There are different types of data that libraries can buy, including geospatial, numeric, qualitative, and social media, to name a few. Each type requires thought and planning to make available to researchers. Licensing commercially available data sets can be particularly challenging and we will share what we have learned over the years as we built our data collections and initiated a patron demand driven data program. We will also discuss the ongoing debate over who should build data collections: the subject specialist or data librarian?