Cultivating Data Expertise and Roles at a National Research Center

Abstract:

As research becomes more computation and data-intensive, it brings new demands for staff that can manage complex data, design user services, and facilitate open access. Responding to these new demands, universities and research institutions are developing data services to support their scientists and scholarly communities. As more organizations extend their operations to research data, a better understanding of the staff roles and expertise required to support data-intensive research services is needed. What is data expertise - knowledge, skills, and roles? This study addresses this question through a case study of an exemplar research center, the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, CO.

The NCAR case study results were supplemented and validated with a set of interviews of managers at additional geoscience data centers. To date, 11 interviews with NCAR staff and 19 interviews with managers at supplementary data centers have been completed. Selected preliminary results from the qualitative analysis will be reported in the poster:

• Data professionals have cultivated expertise in areas such as managing scientific data and products, understanding use and users, harnessing technology for data solutions, and standardizing metadata and data sets.
• Staff roles and responsibilities have evolved over the years to create new roles for data scientists, data managers/curators, data engineers, and senior managers of data teams, embedding data expertise into each NCAR lab.
• Explicit career paths and ladders for data professionals are limited but starting to emerge.
• NCAR has supported organization-wide efforts for data management, leveraging knowledge and best practices across all the labs and their staff.

Based on preliminary results, NCAR provides a model for how organizations can build expertise and roles into their data service models. Data collection for this study is ongoing. The author anticipates that the results will help answer questions on what are the knowledge and skills required for data professionals and how organizations can develop data expertise.