Rebooting the Research Data Management Program: The First Year and Looking Ahead Objective and Introduction The University of Connecticut Library had an inactive program for research data management education until it hired two new librarians in June 2017 to fulfill this role. The goal of our position is to work as science librarian liaisons and to provide programming, education, and outreach around the subject of research data management. Our poster will outline the three areas of activities that we undertook as a team to meet our objective of relaunching the RDM program. These three areas are: • Needs assessment • Skill building • Workshop and event planning Our goal of presenting this poster is to elicit feedback and to start a conversation about the role of research data management librarians in developing academic library workshops and programming. Researcher Interviews We interviewed 8 researchers from the UConn science community. What were the takeaways? • We learned that researchers need help with storage options for their research. • Researchers are unsure of what resources are available to help them with DMP plans and storage • Professors want workshops about research data management and version control for their students. Our questionnaire was based upon: Read, K. B., Surkis, A., Larson, C., McCrillis, A., Graff, A., Nicholson, J., & Xu, J. (2015). Starting the data conversation: informing data services at an academic health sciences library. Journal of the Medical Library Association : JMLA, 103(3), 131–135. http://doi.org/10.3163/1536- 5050.103.3.005 Needs Assessment: Environmental Scan • Survey of 16 peer and aspirant institutions: • Assessed services, classes, and events offered • Phone interviews with librarians from the peers/aspirants list • Selected literature review • Site visits to other data librarians What we learned: • the state of RDM at libraries varies greatly • seeing that others are in the same position of starting a program is helpful and reassuring • seeing what others are achieving is inspirational • To be successful we need strong advocacy and financial support from our institution • We also need help with advocacy and connections with other departments/campus units • We need to expand our services to build the program and to be competitive with other institutions • We also need to be mindful of what works for this library and this institution • Some institutions have librarians do programming, and others have researcher/PHDs do data topics instruction - we found this more often than expected. • We need to consider what training we need or what partnerships to develop to bring the needed programming to our institution Community Building We established relationships with community partners such as: • Connecticut Data Collaborative • New England Library Carpentries (NESCLIC) • City of Hartford Skill Building • NNLM/NIH Biomedical and Health Research Data Management for Librarians course • Carpentries' Instructor certification • New England Research Data Management Roundtables • Renee attended August 2018 Carpentries training at the University of Calgary • Force11 Scholarly Communications Institute: Summer 2019 Conclusion We have found that establishing a vibrant research data program requires being proactive and taking a scaffolded, multi-pronged approach. It is important to conduct outreach to different communities (graduate students, faculty, student groups, non-profits, city departments, etc.) in order to maximize your effectiveness. Past Events Open Data Salon, Hartford Public Library For this event, we invited ten people: UConn researchers, librarians, data journalists, city employees, and non-profit educators, all of whom use open municipal data in their work, to present at the UConn location in downtown Hartford. UConn Hartford's library is located inside the Hartford Public Library, which provides for opportunities for outreach to Harford residents. Tyler Kleycamp, the Chief Data Officer