Components of Research Data Management (RDM) in Academic Libraries

In order to develop the services of academic libraries and provide new services called Research Data Management (RDM) for helping faculty members and researchers in managing their own research data and benefiting from the research data of others, this article seeks to identify the components of RDM in academic libraries. The outcome can be used as a model for implementing RDM in a systematic and effective way.

This research was carried out in two steps. The first step was a qualitative content analysis to identify components of RDM. In the second step using the identified compontents, a questionnaire was composed and circulated in two Delphi rounds among 20 Iranian experts in the field for validation and refinement. To ensure the reliability of the questionnaire and the internal consistency of questions, Cronbach's alpha coefficient was calculated with a result of 0.97.

In the first step 69 components were identified for 6 steps of RDM process, 1) planning; 2) ethical and legal issues; 3) organizing, documenting, generating metadata, 4) storing and backing up, 5) preserving, protecting, deleting data, 6) sharing, and dissemination. Participants added two new steps 1) education and counseling and 2) technical to the previous 6 steps. Also, some components were removed, modified, merged, and moved, and finally 56 components were emphasized in 8 stages.

All identified components are important in the management of research data in academic libraries. In addition, the results showed that the two components of "formulation and development of research data management plan" and "generating metadata to data and files" are of particular importance. Developing data management plan helps individuals and research institutes estimate the material and human resources needed for projects in advance. Also, generating metadata by increasing percision, makes search, retrieval, discovery, access, and reuse of data by other researchers. Academic libraries should consider this in research data management activities.