5.2 Personalized DMP Support Service: Lessons Learned and Best Practices
Creators: name: Dieudé, Aude
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2016
Subjects: research, library, innovation, solutions, knowledge

description: In what ways can a research library foster innovative services and concrete solutions for opening up new pathways to interacting with and creating knowledge? In February 2015, the EPFL Library paved the way by creating the first personalized data management plan (DMP) support service in Switzerland to best answer the needs of its researchers. Set up in close collaboration with the Research Office and the IT Department at the EPFL, this service comprises data librarians, research data specialists, and liaison librarians, who can customise their expertise according to the project’s research field. Collaborating more closely with researchers in an international environment and offering them tailored insights and training on how to optimise their research data management has contributed to building stronger trust relationships. Working with them individually or with their teams and their labs, while being present throughout the life cycle of their data, encouraged them to rethink their habits and refine their long-term methodologies and strategies. Our experience demonstrates that this personalised approach, coupled with the creation of regular institutional training and workshops on open access, data mining, data visualisation and data management planning tools such as DMPonline, expanded this initiative and strengthened our efforts to reach a more diverse and larger audience. From theory to practice and from practice back to theory, our approach was both pragmatic and scientific focusing on the urgent and current needs of EPFL researchers, project leaders, PhD and postdoctoral students. Thanks to the DMP personalised and proactive support service, our team has provided its expertise on 32 projects and met with a wide range of collaborators including researchers, project managers, PhDs, postdocs and scientific fellows. This experience altered their perception regarding the Library’s role in opening up new pathways to knowledge from groups of research experts to reach larger communities. By creating this personalised DMP support service, the Rolex Learning Center Library put into light the new role of the library as a ‘one-stop-shop’, where researchers can receive tailored guidance regarding their data management, visualisation, publication and storage. This pioneering approach in Switzerland has also served as a springboard for the national project dedicated to Data Life Cycle Management (DLCM), which aims at offering research data management tailored tools, training and services on a national level. <strong>Aude Dieudé </strong>received her PhD from Duke University and specialises in research data management at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). She coordinates the personalised data management plan (DMP) support service at the Rolex Learning Center (EPFL) and offers training in Switzerland and abroad on how to optimise research data management. In addition, she is leading the first stage of the Swiss national project (DLCM) focusing on providing sustainable and tangible solutions to implement research data life-cycle management. <strong>Isabelle Kratz</strong> has been Library Director at the Swiss Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) since March 2012. Located in the famous building known as the Rolex Learning Center, the EPFL Library has recently been working to regain its place within the institutional research community, while not losing sight of students’ needs. Competencies and efforts have focused on major issues such as Open Access Publication and Open Research Data. The work is beginning to pay dividends and the Library now has a major role in the stewardship of services dedicated to researchers. Before coming to EPFL, Isabelle Kratz was Library Director at the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, where she worked at modernising librarianship and libraries. Her library experience ranges from leading technical library services to managing important libraries with different positions in between. She is a graduate of the Ecole Nationale des Chartes (Paris) as archivist-paleographer (Ecole Nationale des Chartes, Paris), and she has a Master’s in History from University Paris I.