Research Data Management and the Health Sciences Librarian

INTRODUCTION As science becomes increasingly characterized by large-scale collaborations and computational data sets, researchers face a range of data management challenges and needs. This creates an opportunity for health sciences librarians to offer researchers at their institutions a range of data management strategies and services. By providing research data management (RDM) services, librarians connect and collaborate in new ways with the researcher communities within their institutions. But exactly what kinds of RDM services can health sciences librarians of-fer? How can health sciences librarians engage with biomedical researchers and market these services? These are the questions that current library school students concentrating in health sciences librarianship and practicing health sciences librarians are asking. The answers are many and varied. Along with actually searching, assigning meta-data elements, and curating, preserving, and archiving data sets in digital collections , health sciences librarians are teaching researchers and students about RDM fundamentals, best practices, and assisting them with writing data management plans (DMPs). The librarians who fill these research roles may be called e-science librarians, scientific data curators, research librarians, data librarians, research infor-mationists, or embedded librarians. Whatever the title, these librarians are engaging with the data needs of the health sciences research community. Some health sciences librarians are already participating in RDM activities, whereas others are still examining models to best adopt these emerging services. RDM services require the development, coordination, and synthesis of a range of library and institutional services and programs. This chapter outlines several of these health sciences librarian RDM services and roles, and addresses the following themes.