Challenges in navigating the research enterprise

Coordinating any type of service or offering across offices and departments is a persistent and pervasive problem at large universities, and research data support services are no exception.  As Ruby MacDougall noted in the announcement of Ithaka S+R’s Building Campus Strategies for Data Support Services project, “data support services tend to exist in silos, which can create economic inefficiencies, duplication of services, and programming gaps.” These challenges motivated a multi-unit team from The Ohio State University to participate in the cohort project aimed at coordinating data services on university campuses.

Over the course of the two-year project, representatives from our university and health sciences libraries, data science research center, and research computing offices worked together to envision the future of data services at Ohio State. Together we completed an inventory of campus data services, conducted a series of interviews with researchers, and participated in brainstorming and ideation sessions coordinated by Ithaka S+R. Through this work, we homed in on two initiatives: an interest group for data service providers and a centralized website for service discovery. We felt these solutions would help address the barriers we had identified on our campus with the goal of building stable and sustainable solutions.

Design workshop activity that led Ohio State’s team to our two implementation ideas. View the full size image.

The Research Data Assistance Network is born

The Research Data Assistance Network, or RDAN for short, was designed to serve as a campus-wide community of practice for people who work in a variety of data services with the goal of improving communication and coordination across our campus. By focusing on the human element of data services, we hope to develop RDAN as a community-based and collaborative network.

Using the data we collected as part of our institutional inventory, we identified an initial list of invitees from data services across campus, including high performance computing, libraries, biostatistics/statistics, qualitative data, clinical data, data storage, research cores, and more. We sent direct email invitations to the identified contacts in September 2024, and welcomed suggestions of other colleagues in their departments that we may have missed. Both the response rate and interest in joining were very high, and RDAN membership currently sits at approximately 55 people from more than three dozen Ohio State service units.

Recognizing the demands on people’s time and the potentially limited capacity to engage, we wanted to make RDAN accessible to anyone in a data support service role. As such, membership in RDAN does not require any specific time or work commitments. New members are added to the RDAN Microsoft Teams channel, where information can be shared, questions can be posed to others, and members can connect with their colleagues. So far, members have advertised upcoming events, sought out resources for increasing digital accessibility in data products, and discussed the changing landscape of federal data. We envision that over time members might also use RDAN as a space to engage and connect with one another on collaborative projects.

RDAN members introduce themselves on the new Microsoft Teams channel.

RDAN members introduce themselves on the new Microsoft Teams channel. View the full size image.

Ohio State’s team from the Ithaka S+R project currently serve as organizers for RDAN by sending centralized communications about collaborative opportunities, presenting on the community’s intended function, and demonstrating its value through sample posts on Teams. We also hosted an inaugural RDAN Networking Social in November 2024, which was designed as an introductory gathering for members to meet, get to know each other, and learn about our goals for RDAN and why they were invited. We were surprised to find that a short presentation by our team spurred a 45-minute discussion among the dozen attendees about the same coordination challenges and desire for change that had motivated RDAN’s creation. It was clear that we had created space for conversations that others were interested in having.

Developing an institutional webpage for data services

Like many other institutions within the Ithaka S+R cohort, we also hope to create a central webpage that all researchers and providers can reference to locate information about data services across campus. From our inventory, we found that information about our campus resources were highly decentralized and inconsistently described. This makes it difficult for researchers to locate information about services, as well as to determine if they are eligible to use them. Similarly, we have heard from RDAN members that they too face challenges in identifying other service providers for collaboration, gap analysis, or referrals.

Our hope is to harness the power of RDAN to help us better centralize and streamline this information. Towards this goal, we held two Town Hall sessions in December 2024 and January 2025 to gather input and feedback directly from interested RDAN members. We focused these meetings on three areas of discussion: the benefit a website might bring to both members and researchers, the features that would be most helpful in such a resource, and any challenges they could foresee. We utilized a combination of discussion questions and one of the ideation exercises from Ithaka S+R’s design workshop to get these conversations started, help build community, and prime attendees’ brains to begin thinking creatively to solve our common challenges.

A core challenge discussed by RDAN members in the Town Halls was the difficulty of keeping content up-to-date and relevant. By tapping into a grassroots professional network, we are hopeful that we will be able to get sufficient backing and momentum to avoid this pitfall.

What comes next?

We are taking the information gathered at the Town Hall sessions into consideration as we begin drafting a formalized project proposal for a data services website, which we plan to share with potential collaborators and sponsors on campus.  To continue strengthening the RDAN community of practice, we are also planning to hold ongoing networking events to help build this powerful social infrastructure. However, we have yet to define a succession plan that will ensure the ongoing support of RDAN as our participation in the Ithaka S+R project winds down.

Moving forward, our work will be guided by the goal of engaging with the RDAN membership to make certain that any campus solutions we develop are grounded in the needs and experiences of those providing and using data services.  We need to ensure that our solutions do not become new silos themselves and are instead engaging and responsive to those who need them most.