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Collaboration or competition?
Responses to Research Data Management in Higher Education
by librarians, IT professionals, and research administrators
A study submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements
for the degree of Master of Science in Digital Library Management
at
The University of Sheffield
by
Eddy Verbaan
July 2013
2
Abstract
Background. Research Data Management (RDM) became a concern in 2011 when RCUK
published its Common Principles on Data Policy. EPSRC expects full compliance with its
requirements by 2015. Many universities now have RDM policies in place, but still lack an RDM
support infrastructure. A close collaboration between library services, IT services, and the
research support office are essential, but they will not have worked in a partnership before, nor
is it evident how the roles could be divided.
Aims. The study aims to uncover how RDM refashions relationships between the library, IT
services and the research office. It evaluates Abbott’s theory of professions, who claims that
the emergence of a new area of work will lead to competition between adjacent professions
over jurisdiction.
Methods. Data was collected through 20 semi-structured interviews with staff in managerial
and non-managerial positions at the Library, IT Services and Research Office of a research
intensive university of middling size in Northern England.
Results. The Library was the only department claiming a new jurisdiction in RDM. It sees its
involvement as a provider of access to research data via a repository, and as a provider of
training, guidance and support to the research community. From the Library’s perspective,
RDM can be seen as an extension of its existing jurisdiction in Open Access and Information
Literacy. Although many overlapping areas with IT services and the research support office
were identified, there was no evidence of a full-scale Abbottonian struggle between competing
professions. These departments seemed happy with the Library’s lead. They claimed to be
short of resources to take on such a complex project. Some feared RDM may be a “poisoned
chalice”. There was also a prevalent managerial concern for the benefit to the institution that
outweighed professional dispute.
Conclusions. It is concluded that RDM does not emerge as a battlefield between adjacent
professions over jurisdiction, but that further research stretching beyond the HEI of this case
study is required to substantiate this claim.
3
Acknowledgements
This dissertation was undertaken as part of the JISC-funded RDMRose project and owes much
to its project leader, Andrew Cox. I would also like to express my gratitude to Barbara Sen and
Anna Vasconcelos for their willingness to listen and for their helpful comments. Finally, I am
indebted to those who gave me their time for an interview. They remain anonymous.
Word count: 14,895
4
Table of Contents
Abstract ......................................................................................................................................................... 2
Acknowledgements ....................................................................................................................................... 3
Table of Contents .......................................................................................................................................... 4
List of Figures ................................................................................................................................................ 6
List of Tables ................................................................................................................................................. 7
1. Introduction .............................................................................................................................................. 8
2. Theoretical framework............................................................................................................................ 11
3. Institutional stakeholders ....................................................................................................................... 15
Libraries and librarians ............................................................................................................. 15
Research offices and research administrators ......................................................................... 19
IT services and IT professionals ................................................................................................ 20
4. Methodology ........................................................................................................................................... 23
5. Findings ................................................................................................................................................... 25
Professional identity ................................................................................................................ 25
Research ................................................................................................................................... 26
Research Data Management ................................................................................................... 28
Personal professional drivers and barriers to engage in RDM ................................................ 30
Contacts ................................................................................................................................... 33
Views of the professional services ........................................................................................... 35
Change ................................................................................................................................. 35
Service orientation ............................................................................................................... 36
Formality .............................................................................................................................. 37
Collaboration ........................................................................................................................ 37
Divisions of RDM roles and areas of overlap ........................................................................... 38
IT Services ............................................................................................................................ 38
Research Office .................................................................................................................... 39
Library .................................................................................................................................. 40
Areas of overlap and competition ....................................................................................... 41
6. Discussion ................................................................................................................................................ 45
7. Conclusions ............................................................................................................................................. 51
Abbreviations .............................................................................................................................................. 53
5
Appendix A: Interview protocol .................................................................................................................. 54
Appendix B: Participant Information Sheet ................................................................................................ 56
Appendix C: Consent Form ......................................................................................................................... 60
Bibliography ................................................................................................................................................ 62
6
List of Figures
Figure 1 Components of RDM support services (Jones et al.,2013,p.5). ....................................... 9
Figure 2 Hofstede's onion diagram. ............................................................................................. 12
Figure 3 Relationships between the professional services and the academic community. ........ 15
Figure 4 Division of likely roles for the three main professional services in RDM. ..................... 49
7
List of Tables
Table 1 Group and grid dimensions according to Trice, based on Trice,1993,
Sonnenstuhl&Trice,1991, and adapted from Ramachandran&Rao,2006. .................................. 13
Table 2 Library roles in RDM mapped to existing library roles and required competencies
(Cox&Pinfield, 2013, as adapted from Cox et al.,2012). .............................................................. 18
Table 3 Conflicting and shared values of IT professionals and librarians in HE (based on
Creth,1993,p.121). ....................................................................................................................... 22
Table 4 Interview sample. ............................................................................................................ 25
8
1. Introduction
Research Data Management (RDM) is a relatively new phenomenon. It became a concern in
2011 when Research Councils UK published their RCUK Common Principles on Data Policy,
outlining their requirements regarding the management of data produced by funded research.
The policy of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) is particularly
important since it required Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) to formulate a roadmap by 1
May 2012, outlining how they would comply with the new RDM requirements. EPSRC requires
full compliance by 1 May 2015 (EPSRC,2013). As a result of these pressures, the first
institutional policies were published in 2011 (DCC,2013a). The first EPSRC roadmap documents
became available a year later (DCC,2013b). Meanwhile, the professional and academic
literature caught up, most notably with the publication of a collection of papers on The Data
Deluge (Marcum&George,2010), a collection of essays on Managing Research Data (Pryor,
2012), and a manual on Digital Curation (Harvey,2010). Support for RDM has been focussed on
projects funded by the JISC Managing Research Data programme (JISC,2013) and through the
support activities of the UK-based Digital Curation Centre (DCC).
RDM can be defined as a lifecycle: it “concerns the organisation of data, from its entry to the
research cycle through to the dissemination and archiving of valuable results”
(Whyte&Tedds,2011). It spans both the storing and sharing of data, where applicable. It also
involves pre-award research planning, in-project management of active data, and post-project
preservation and sharing. It can be argued that the push for RDM is an alignment of different
agendas that have recently come to prominence. This includes the advent of big data
(Marcum&George,2010), the problematic nature of the preservation of digital information, the
open access agenda, the popularity of arguments involving public good obligations especially in
the policies of RCUK, and recent issues with data security (such as leakage of sensitive digital
information) and research integrity (falsification of research data by renowned researchers and
research groups).
Although the majority of HEIs now have, or will soon have, policies in place, most institutions
are still in the early stages of planning and implementing an RDM support infrastructure, but
that the academic libraries seem to be taking on a leadership role (Cox&Pinfield,2013). It is
significant that the DCC published its authoritative guide on How to Develop RDM Services
(Jones et al.,2013) only on 25 March 2013. The components of such an infrastructure range
9
from general guidance, training and support, to Data Management Planning, the management
of active data, and the management of non-active data through selection of what needs to be
kept, preservation in a data repository, and discovery through data catalogues (Jones et
al.,2013) (Figure 1).
Figure 1 Components of RDM support services (Jones et al.,2013,p.5).
It is widely agreed that RDM services require various support teams within the institution to
collaborate, since none of these teams has the expertise to cover the whole gamut of the
required RDM infrastructure. One considers the library, IT services, and research administration
as the most likely partners in this joint venture (Hodson&Jones,2013; Jones et al.,2013). As a
rule, these stakeholders will not have worked in a partnership before. Also, it is not yet clear
how the roles that are necessary to set up and maintain an effective RDM service should be
divided between them, although the assigned roles should fit the available expertise.
There is therefore scope for the professional departments, and indeed for the wider
professions, to make their mark in this new area of work. Especially in the literature about
Library and Information Science (LIS) the possible roles of the library and librarians have
10
already been the topic of discussion (Auckland,2012; Corrall,2012; Cox et al.,2012; Lyon,2012;
Brewerton,2011; Lewis,2010). This debate about roles and matching skills is framed in a larger,
more abstract discussion about the scope of the LIS profession. It has been argued that
Information Technology (IT) has had an obvious profound influence on libraries and the library
profession through “a reinvention of the access role” (Cox&Corall,2013) that now includes
online information provision. Over the last few decades the profession has also taken on a new
educational role in Information Literacy (IL) (O’Connor,2009; Wilson&Halpin,2006) and it has
played a vital role in the Open Access (OA) movement through advocacy and management of
OA repositories. These fundamental changes in the operational area of academic libraries have
been interpreted as a response to the threat of digitization and the Internet to the Library’s
traditional area of work: providing access to printed books and journals (Cox&Corrall,2013;
Corrall,2010; O’Connor,2009; Wilson&Halpin,2006; Danner,1998; Ray,2001; Van
House&Sutton,1996). This has often been analysed using Andrew Abbott’s (1988) theory of
professions. This theory, which is particularly popular in LIS, argues that changes in the context
in which a profession operates causes a continuous competition between neighbouring
professions over “jurisdiction”, i.e. a monopoly over a certain area of work. The move of
academic libraries into IT, IL and OA could therefore be interpreted as an extension of LIS’s
jurisdiction in response to contextual changes (such as the democratization of digital
information) in direct competition with adjacent professions (such as IT and academia). RDM
may be considered an arena where various professions meet and vie for jurisdiction over a new
area of work.
The present study focuses on this professional collaborative aspect of RDM. This is currently a
pressing topic in many HEIs, but has not yet been studied in the academic and professional
literature at the moment of writing. This paper aims to uncover how RDM might refashion
relationships between the three main professional services, by evaluating Abbott’s theory of
professions, who claims that the emergence of a new area of work will lead to competition
between adjacent professions over jurisdiction. It addresses the following questions:
- How does professional identity reflect in ideas about research and RDM?
- How do professionals think the wide gamut of RDM roles may be divided over the
relevant departments?
11
- Can RDM be seen as a competitive arena in which the professions fight over
jurisdiction?
In order to answer these questions, this paper takes a case study approach. The case study is
based on qualitative data derived from 12 semi-structured interviews with staff in both
managerial and non-managerial roles in the three main stakeholder departments of one
particular institution: a UK research intensive university of middling size with separate
professional services departments for library and IT services, and with a centralized research
office.
First, the study outlines its theoretical framework: Abbott’s theory of professions is introduced
and expanded using the concepts of occupational cultures and Third Space. Secondly, the
literature on the professional identity of the three main institutional stakeholders in RDM are
presented. Finally, the study’s methodology is introduced, the findings of the interviews are
presented and discussed in the light of Abbott’s ideas.
2. Theoretical framework
The three stakeholder groups involved in RDM belong to different occupational and
professional groups. It can be argued that they have different occupational cultures which may
impede on their successful collaboration. Such cultures are usually considered to consist of an
invisible set of shared values or ideologies and an observable set of “practices” (Hofstede,1991)
or “forms” (Trice,1993) in which the group members express their shared values
(McInnis,1996b; Hofstede et al.,1990; Cain,2003), as can be gleaned from Hofstede’s (1991)
well-known onion diagram (Figure 2). One can distinguish organizational cultures (Schein,2004;
Hofstede,1991) from occupational or professional ones. These can be divided into professional
subcultures, covering a profession within an organization, and professional cultures which
transcend the boundaries of the organization (Guzman et al.,2008; Hofstede,1998; Trice,1993).
Lave and Wenger (1991) explain how occupational identity formation is linked to what they call
“situated learning”: the acquisition of knowledge and skills of the occupation happens through
participation in the everyday social practices of the occupation. This could be via vocational
education or learning at the workplace. Hofstede et al. (1990) have suggested that in an
organizational culture this socialization takes place in the workplace, and culture consists
12
predominantly of practices rather than values. In an occupational culture, however, shared
values play a far more important role, and socialization will happen primarily at school or
university, before entering into work (Loogma et al.,2004), although Trice (1993) argues that
occupational socialization also happens through shared personal and work experiences.
Figure 2 Hofstede's onion diagram.
Trice (1993) developed a theoretical framework for studying occupational subcultures based on
the grid-group cultural theory from British anthropologist Douglas (Mamadou,1999;
Douglas,1982). Seven group dimensions represent the underlying values of an occupational
culture, and three less well defined grid dimensions describe the way members of the
occupational group behave towards each other; they form the visible forms in which the group
dimensions are expressed. These grid dimensions are “less potent and certainly less
interesting” because “occupations form fewer and less intense grids than do organizations”
(Trice,1993,p.42).
Group dimensions Description
1. Esoteric knowledge Unique tasks and skills
2. Extreme or unusual demands Level of challenge presented by the
occupation
3. Consciousness of kind Definition of who is an insider or outsider
13
4. Primary reference group Level of reliance and support from peers
5. Social image of occupation Identity derived from occupation
6. Abundance of cultural form Richness of cultural forms like saga,
stories, myths and so on
7. Pervasiveness Level of influence wielded on activities
inside and outside the organization
Grid dimensions Description
1. Hierarchical authority
2. Autonomy over their own work,
and control over other workers
3. Imposed and formal rules, and
division of labour
Showcases the tangible structure of an
occupation and its impact on structuring
relations
Table 1 Group and grid dimensions according to Trice, based on Trice,1993, Sonnenstuhl&Trice,1991, and adapted
from Ramachandran&Rao,2006.
Trice highlights that there is scope for conflicts between the various occupational subcultures
due to their different value systems (the group dimensions). Such conflicts can be resolved by
what Trice calls “adaptations”, of which accommodation of an occupational subculture to that
of another or the assimilation of the occupational subculture into another are only two of many
possible outcomes. Abbott’s theory of professions focuses on long term structural conflicts
between professional cultures, not limited to a single organization.
Abbott (1988) theory of professions has been particularly influential in the LIS literature.
Abbott himself has written repeatedly about the information professions (1988,pp.215-246;
1998) and others have analysed the profession of librarians in an Abbottonian way, especially
its relationship to IT (Cox&Corrall,2013; O'Connor,2009; Ray,2001; Danner,1998; Van
House&Sutton,1996).
Abbott defines professions as “exclusive occupational groups applying somewhat abstract
knowledge to particular cases” (p.8). A profession controls these abstractions and can thus
redefine the profession’s scope. According to Abbott, professions are in constant competition
with one another because the environment in which they operate is constantly changing. This
could be the context of larger socio-cultural developments, the context of competing
14
professions that contest the usual area of work of a profession, and the context of competing
organizations or commodities (such as technologies) that can provide similar expertise as the
profession and is thus threatening its hold over that area of work.
Abbott's system of professions is “a world of pushing and shoving, of contests won and lost”
(Abbott,1998,p.433) and “an interacting system” (Abbott,1988,p.33). In essence, the theory
states that professions seek to claim exclusivity over certain areas of work, which is what
Abbott calls jurisdiction. Claims for jurisdiction can be made in three different ways:
1. through acquisition of power to license and regulate those who may perform the area
of work by means of a professional organization such as CILIP for librarians, BCS for IT
professionals, and ARMA for research administrators,
2. through creating a public image that associates the profession with that area of work,
3. and through direct competition with other occupations and professions in the
workplace.
It is important to notice that Abbott claims that professions cannot occupy a jurisdiction
“without either finding it vacant or fighting for it” (1998,p.86): if there is a vacant jurisdiction –
such as RDM – this will be a trigger for events in which adjacent professions dispute each
other’s jurisdiction. Such disputes can be solved in a number of ways. First, they can lead to
either full jurisdiction for the profession, or to the subordination of a number of professions to
another one. Abbott likens this to the relationship nursing has to medicine. Secondly, the
dispute can result in a standoff that leads to a more or less equal division of the jurisdiction into
interdependent parts. Abbott calls this a division of labour or a divided jurisdiction. Other
solutions are intellectual jurisdiction and advisory jurisdiction, which are both weaker forms of
control and unstable settlements of the conflict. In intellectual jurisdiction one profession
controls the knowledge base of an area of work, but shares its practice with one or more
competitors, such as in the field of psychotherapy: the main ideas in the field are developed in
the discipline of psychiatry, but its practice is principally the domain of psychologists and social
workers. Advisory jurisdiction (or consultancy) is a weaker form of control in which two
professions already have an independent jurisdiction of their own, but one profession does not
seek to control the knowledge base, but to act in an advisory function to another. Abbott's
example is the advisory relationship law has to banking and accounting. A sixth and last form of
settlement is characterized as "jurisdictional settlement by client differentiation" (1988,p.77).
15
Psychotherapy is an example where psychiatrists treat the upper classes, psychologists the
middle classes, and social workers the lower classes.
3. Institutional stakeholders
Many stakeholders can be identified in RDM. In a survey of 35 UK institutions in receipt of
EPSRC funding, Pryor (2012) found that the main stakeholders consulted in producing the
EPSRC roadmap were the Research Office (34), Senior Management (31), IT Services (31), the
Library (29), and Researchers (27). The scope of this study is limited to the three professional
services (Figure 3).
Figure 3 Relationships between the professional services and the academic community.
Libraries and librarians
Librarians belong to an established profession with a long tradition. There are dedicated
university curricula in Library and Information Studies (LIS), and there is a well-established
professional body that accredits these curricula, CILIP (Wilson&Halpin,2006;
Roberts&Kohn,1991). Although such bodies also exist for research administration and IT
services, they are far less well established and seem to be less authoritative.
16
The LIS profession has occasionally been studied from the viewpoint of its competition with
neighbouring professions and occupations, most notably Information Technology. Abbott’s
theory of professions has been frequently used (Cox&Corrall,2013; O’Connor,2008,2009;
Wilson&Halpin,2006; Danner,1998; Ray2001; Van House&Sutton,1996; Abbott,1998,1988).
Using Abbott and Bourdieu’s theory of social practice as their theoretical framework, Van
House and Sutton (1996) argue that the field is under threat from other professions and
academic disciplines: “LIS risks being outnumbered, outmanoeuvred, and rendered marginal”
(p.145). Most notably, this threat comes from Information Technology, digital information
(both digitized and born-digital), and the Internet. It is argued that this has led to “a reinvention
of the access role” potentially in competition with IT professionals, the Library has taken on the
management of electronic content (Cox&Corall,2013). This resulted in a blurring of the
boundaries of the LIS field: this started to include areas such as information systems,
information technology and computer science. New terms were invented for LIS practitioners
to reflect these changes, such as the “hybrid librarian” and the “blended professional”
(Corrall,2010; Wilson&Halpin,2006). The emergence of the hybrid library is also evidenced
through the emergence of organisational convergence of the academic Library and IT services,
and through emerging collaborative relationships between these two professional services
(Joint,2011; Hwang,2008; Stemmer,2007; Renaud,2006; Wilson&Halpin,2006; Cain,2003;
Favini,1997; Creth,1993).
The inclusion of IT-related tasks in the LIS profession’s jurisdiction, is combined with the advent
of Information Literacy (IL) and the librarian’s increasing educational/teaching role
(O’Connor,2008,2009; Wilson and Halpin,2006). This can be seen as “an attempt to rearticulate
and legitimate librarians’ claim to an educational jurisdiction at a time their traditional access-
oriented jurisdiction is threatened” (O’Connor,2008, p. 272; also: Cox&Corrall,2013;
Corrall,2010; O’Connor,2009). O’Connor (2009) argues that IL helped the library profession in
several ways: it replaced access with new educational tasks, it cut the librarian loose from the
physical library to create a jurisdiction around a concept rather than an object, and it expanded
the client base by defining IL as a lifelong skill.
It may be that a similar response to the still increasing threat to the library’s traditional access
role through the democratization of access to information is happening with the RDM agenda
(Cox&Pinfield,2013). Perhaps this could be seen as an extension of the growing role academic
17
libraries have played in the recent past in institutional repository management and data
curation – again “seemingly seeking to expand the profession’s access jurisdiction into new
areas” (Cox&Corrall,2013,p.12). Although this recent development involves open access
repositories for research publications, with the advent of the RDM agenda this role could
possibly extend to include open data repositories (Corrall,2010).
Finally, RDM has been discussed in relation to the roles that academic libraries could play.
There is a general recognition of “the need for a sea change in the support that libraries and
Subject Librarians give to researchers”, which is partly inspired by evidence that researchers do
not engage with the Library (Auckland,2012; Brewerton,2011; Garritano&Carlson,2009;
Henty,2008). A fair body of literature suggests that the academic library could play an
important role in RDM as part of this renewed engagement with research and researchers
(Monastersky,2013; Corrall,2012; Cox et al.,2012; Lyon,2012; Alvaro et al.,2011; Lewis,2010;
Gabridge,2009). Recent surveys (Corrall,2013; Cox&Pinfield,2013; Auckland,2012) show that
academic library services in the English-speaking world are indeed slowly moving into this
space. Lewis (2010), Corrall (2012) and Lyon (2012) have suggested ways in which Libraries
could engage with RDM (
Table 2). Such literature does not yet exist for the other professional services.
Role Alignment with
existing library roles
Competencies required
Policy and advocacy
Lead on institutional data policy Advocacy role e.g. in
the area of open
access
Strategic understanding
and influencing skills
Support and training
Bring data into undergraduate research-
based learning, promoting data
information literacy
Information literacy
training
Understanding of RDM
best practices as they
apply to relevant
disciplines; pedagogic
skills
Teach data literacy to postgraduate
students
Develop researcher data awareness
18
Provide an advice service to researchers
(and research administrators), e.g.:
Advice on writing Data Management
Plans, RDM within a project, licensing
data, on data citation and on
measurement of impact of data sharing.
Reference and enquiry
roles; producing print
and web based guides;
copyright advice.
Reference interview,
knowledge of RDM
principles
Provide advice as above through a web
portal
Library web site Knowledge of
institutional and extra-
institutional resources
Signpost who in the institution should be
consulted in relation to a particular
question
Role of library as point
of enquiry and the
reference interview
Knowledge of
institution
Promote data reuse by making known
what is available internally and
externally; explaining data citation
Marketing of library
resources
Knowledge of
researchers’ needs,
knowledge of available
material
Auditing and data repository
Audit to identify data sets for archiving,
create a catalogue of materials or to
identify RDM needs
Cataloguing and
metadata creation
Metadata skills
Develop and manage access to data
collections
Collection
development, digital
library management
and metadata
management
Audit interviews,
knowledge of RDM
principles, metadata,
licensing
Develop local data curation capacity Open access role.
Preservation role.
Knowledge of RDM
principles, relevant
technologies and
processes, metadata
Table 2 Library roles in RDM mapped to existing library roles and required competencies (Cox&Pinfield, 2013, as
adapted from Cox et al.,2012).
19
Research offices and research administrators
Central research offices come in various guises, embedded in various approaches to managing
externally funded research. They may be fully centralized offices where a team of pre-award,
post-award and other professionals are co-located, or they may have opted for highly devolved
structures with faculty- and school-based offices or officers, whilst still retaining a form of
central support (Kent,2006; Green&Langley,2009). These offices are usually small: fewer than
40 staff seems to be the norm, although some larger institutions may have considerably more
(Green&Langley,2009). Originally, the function of research administration belonged to the task
set of academic staff. Macfarlane (2011) discusses how “all-round” academic practice has been
unbundled and some specialist functions such as research administration have become the
domain of what he calls the “para-academic”. This trend has been stimulated by a more
managerialist approach to university governance since the 1980s, and subsequently by a
specialization of administrative support functions. This was caused in particular by increasing
administrative and regulatory demands on universities from government and mechanisms such
as the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) and the Research Excellence Framework (REF).
Since administrating research tasks have become increasingly a strategic corporate concern,
dedicated support services (centralized research offices) have come into existence. Institutional
research offices are thus a fairly new phenomenon that operates on the “interface, between
academic research and corporate management” (Green&Langley,2009,p.4).
The occupation of research administrators does not appear to have many traits of a profession,
such as librarianship. Green and Langley (2009) report that there is a lack of accredited
professional training, appropriate and nationally recognized qualifications, and clear career
progression in the field. Although there is a professional body, called Association for Research
Managers and Administrators (ARMA), it only has around 1,900 members (ARMA,2013).
Indeed, Green and Langley’s (2009,p.17) survey showed “an embryonic profession struggling to
create an identity”. They found that many research administrators did not feel well understood
by either academics or their colleagues from the other support services. Most felt they
belonged “to a profession within their institution” (p.14) but that they were not considered to
be a profession to the same extent as Finance and Human Resources.
Green and Langley (2009) pay little attention to relationships with other support services.
Generally, the literature focuses on the relationship with academic staff. The position of being
20
administrative staff but very closely involved with academics’ research could be the cause of
tensions between academics and the research administrators and generate issues of identity
and credibility. Indeed, a common thread through the literature is McInnes’ (1998,p.168)
observation that administrative staff are often frustrated by their “default identity of ‘non-
academic’”, thus defining administrators as the “other”. Academics are usually viewed as the
“core workforce”, with a wide range of “support workers” in the periphery (Collinson,
2006,p.276; also: Hockey&Collinson,2009; Kimber,2003). Nevertheless, Collinson (2007,2006)
found that this “putative” boundary was in fact a blurred and permeable one: the research
administrators she interviewed recognized there was a tacit boundary, but they emphasized
the shared culture and overlapping duties and responsibilities. At the same time she observed
that research administrators were venturing out into traditional academic tasks such as
teaching, research, and advising research students. Some research administrators described
themselves as “aspiring academics” (Collinson,2006,p.279; Shelley,2010,p.48). Indeed, many
research administrators have undergone academic socialization, e.g. through a Master’s or
doctoral study. Collinson (2006) found that many feel that their work would be more difficult if
they did not have sufficient “academic capital” both for functional reasons (begin able to
understand the research they are supporting) and more importantly for credibility reasons. She
suggests that this might be their distinctive feature within the support services (2006,p.278): “it
can be conjectured that research administrators constitute a relatively distinctive sub-group
within university and college administration in terms of their allegiance to what might be
termed academic or ‘scholarly’ values and culture.” This is caused either by their close
involvement with research, or by their own academic backgrounds. Shelley (2010) points out
that a difference with academics is that they value research capital as individuals rather than
associating it with their institutions, whilst research administrators value research capital
primarily within the framework of their institution’s research.
IT services and IT professionals
Since the IT profession is to a far lesser degree linked to the specific context of Higher
Education, most literature involves the IT profession in general. One strand of studies has
applied Trice's theoretical framework to IT professionals (Guzman&Stanton,2009; Guzman et
al.,2008,2007,2004; Ramachandran&Rao,2006). These studies found that IT professionals have
a distinctive occupational subculture. They found evidence for a strong group dimension
21
(indicating values and norms): amongst others, IT professionals highly value technical
knowledge, have a need to constantly re-educate themselves because of the dynamic changes
in their field, define the boundaries of their community in terms of their occupational role
rather than their training or affiliation to an organization, and they cherish a feeling of
superiority (which Trice calls ethnocentrism). They also found evidence for a weak grid
dimension: there is a lack of formal work rules and there are no clear formal requirements for
membership of the group. Indeed, Guzman et al. (2008,p.46) argued that “the boundaries of IT
occupational subculture are porous, and that some employees may feasibly traverse IT
professional versus non-IT professional roles”.
A few studies have compared librarians with IT professionals. The literature on convergence of
library and IT services usually acknowledges the cultural differences between the two services
(Joint,2011; Hwang,2008; Stemmer,2007). Creth (1993) argues that these differences stem
from training and education: librarians share “a process of acculturation” through their
dedicated and accredited university courses in librarianship, but IT professionals do not have a
shared socialization process and therefore no “shared professional history and values”. In
addition, IT is a relatively new service sector and therefore does not have well established
traditions and profiles, whereas librarianship has a tradition of many centuries (Cain,2003;
Favini,1997).
Creth (1993) reports on a list of conflicting and shared values between the two professions that
was compiled by participants to one of her workshops (
Table 3). The list clearly contrasts the technical orientation of IT professionals versus the
service orientation of librarians, and IT professionals’ entrepreneurial behaviour and librarians’
need for consensus. They have a professional orientation in common, and a concern for the
well-being of their institution.
22
Computing Professionals Librarians
technical orientation service orientation Conflicting Values
entrepreneurial behavior consensus approach
creativity encouraged fiscal responsibility
professional orientation Shared Values
focus on global information community
concerned with well-being of university
Table 3 Conflicting and shared values of IT professionals and librarians in HE (based on Creth,1993,p.121).
Favini (1997) argues that the two have little in common, apart from the fact that they both use
technology to support the university's academic mission; as a result areas of overlap have been
formed. But the professions have different tasks that require different skill sets and attract
different kinds of people with different personalities. He sees three main points of conflict:
1. The IT sector is male dominated and the library sector female dominated, which
reflects on interpersonal interaction.
2. Librarians use technology as a means to an end, whereas IT professionals may see it as
an end to a means. Cain (2003) notes that there is a natural tension between
functionality (librarians) and security (IT professionals) in which the two groups may
“not see eye-to-eye”.
3. “Walking a mile in the other guy's shoes,” i.e. the question of what tasks are to be
performed by which profession.
Another strand in the literature points at the variety of IT-related professional roles. Buche
(2008) argues that IT professionals could have two main role identities: a technical versus a
more general business role. Similarly, Barley (1996) divides technicians into “buffers” – who are
actively engaged in the technical workflow itself – and “brokers” – who have a mediating role
between the users and developers. Zabusky (1997,p.131) characterizes these brokers as
“linguistic interpreters”: they translate technology in terms users can understand and vice
versa they translate users’ requirements into a language developers comprehend. They form a
bridge with the wider community and may have a weaker feeling of belonging to the core IT
profession. Building on these ideas, Loogma et al. (2004) argued that, although interest in IT is
at the core of IT professionals’ work identity, there are several circles around this core where
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the readiness to cross one's career's boundaries into other professional communities increases.
At the ends of the scale are the “geek”, the purely technical specialist who identifies strongest
with technology, and the “transgressor”, who moves away from a purely technical
identification. This could be an IT manager, who has command of a combination of technical
knowledge and managerial skills, but whose technical knowhow will inevitably degenerate
through time. Ramachandran and Rao (2006) compared IT professional subcultures (geeks)
with managerial subcultures (transgressors). They found that “managers believed that their
task was to manage people and communicate the organizational vision. They believed that
managers needed both functional area knowledge and interpersonal skills, but that the latter
was more important” (p.202). IT professionals, on the other hand, did not derive their identity
from the belief that they were the face of the organization, but from the role of IT in the
organization.
4. Methodology
Data was collected through semi-structured interviews with a range of stakeholders in different
support services of one HEI in northern England. The institution is a research intensive
university of average size with separate departments for library and IT services (not a
converged service) and with a centralized research office, henceforth referred to as Library, IT
Services, and Research Office. This organisational structure allows for the analysis of three
separate professions. Cox and Pinfield (2013) found that most HEIs are still in the early stages
with regards to planning and implementing an RDM support service and that libraries are
usually taking on a leadership role. In that light, the HEI of this case study could be seen as
typical: although the Research Office had undertaken a scoping study between September
2011 and August 2012, by the time the interviews were undertaken in the period between
February and April 2013, an RDM service had not yet been set up. Meanwhile it had become
clear that the Library would play a leading role.
An interview protocol was established that addressed the three main research questions of this
study (appendix A). It was loosely applied in a series of 20 semi-structured one-to-one
interviews lasting between 45 and 90 minutes each. As the interviews progressed, the protocol
was adapted. This allowed for new themes to emerge: the questions were adapted to findings
24
from previous interviews in order to reach a more complete understanding. The purpose of the
interviews was to gather insight into:
the professional identity of the interviewees, including their relationships with
academics and other support services,
their views on research,
their views on RDM, including drivers and barriers,
their views on the relationships with other professional services with regards to setting
up and running an RDM infrastructure.
The interviews were recorded, transcribed and then analysed using thematic analysis. Through
careful reading and re-reading of the transcripts, a Framework or “matrix […] for ordering and
synthesising data” was developed in an Excel spreadsheet and applied to the data
(Byrman,2012; Ritchie et al.,2003,p.219). The data set contained over 170,000 words.
The study has primarily an exploratory nature and presents an institutional case study. Finding
a representative sample was therefore less important. Nevertheless, a considerable attempt
was made to ensure a good spread of job roles. The population of our sample consisted of 9
men and 11 women divided over the three professional services, and of the University’s
information security officer and record manager (Table 4). It may be that views on RDM not
only differ between the professions and specific roles within these professions, but also depend
on seniority in the institution. For each of the services, both managers and non-managers were
interviewed; the sample was also deliberately chosen to display a spread over different
relevant units within the departments: it comprised both income capture officers and those
involved in research governance (good research practice) in the Research Office, both subject
liaison librarians, metadata specialists and systems librarians in the Library, and those involved
in infrastructure (hardware) and applications (software) in IT Services. The emphasis lies on the
Library because of its leading role in this university’s RDM activities.
25
Service Population Men/Women Number of
managers
IT Services 03 03/00 02
Research Office 04 02/02 01
Library 11 02/09 03
Other stakeholders 02 02/00 00
Total 20 09/11 06
Table 4 Interview sample.
A notable limitation of this study is that it remains principally a case study of one institution,
with the emphasis on evidence from the Library. It is also important to notice that the analysis
uses accounts of the interviewees, and it is therefore impossible to infer anything about “what
is really going on”. Other more in-depth methods, such as anthropological observations or
archival research (e.g. of minutes of meetings and policy documents), would be the next logical
step in gaining a more in-depth picture.
5. Findings
Since it became apparent from the interviews that within the three professional groups the
diversity of responses was considerable, the findings will be presented according to the topics
discussed in the interviews.
Professional identity
Most interviewees felt at least to some degree part of a wider profession that extended both
inside the institution and outside of it. Interviewees from IT Services described themselves at
least partly as IT professionals and those from the Library as librarians. Interviewees from the
Research Office however were more varied in their responses. They did not identify a common
professional denominator: they described themselves either by their job title, or as a research
administrator, or as a research manager. One respondent even preferred to use a description:
If you say that you work in the research office, most people know what a research office
is in the university and get what they are for. So that’s usually how I describe it if I am
talking to a colleague in another institution.
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However, the most striking difference with regards to feelings of professional identity and
related skills were not those between the professions, but between managers and non-
managers. One of the IT managers explained:
I’ve worked in IT for 20 years, so I’m an IT professional. But in terms of my actual role
these days, I’m a manager. I don’t do much hands-on stuff anymore. I still dabble a bit
but mostly I do management stuff.
Knowledge of IT is still essential to his position, but the managerial role takes precedence:
I’m an IT manager so I guess I manage staff who do IT stuff and I have to have an
understanding of it and how it works and the new technologies and that sort of thing
too. If I had to rank my jobs in order of priority on my job description, the management
stuff would come top […].
Other managers analysed their role in a similar way. One of the respondents considered herself
to be a librarian, but only just, and predominantly from a managerial perspective:
Actually, I’m a library manager, I suppose, rather than librarian. I do try and keep up-to-
date with what’s happening. I can fill in to cover for absence at a push, but I find myself
less able to do that, in terms of the frontline or even the day-to-day academic liaison.
Besides this focus on managerial task and skill sets rather than professional ones, more often
than not managers also described their work as extending outside of their departments, usually
in the formal setting of committees. Often, they explicitly argued that they worked for the
benefit of the institution rather than their particular department:
Okay, I work in the Library, but I actually work for the institution. That’s the primary
thing. I work for the institution and I work for the university […]. That’s what I’m here to
protect and that’s what I’m here to serve, not just the Library.
Non-managerial staff were more likely to work in departmental silos.
Research
All respondents had experience of basic academic research through undergraduate and
postgraduate degrees. Nevertheless, some admitted to having a fairly limited understanding.
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One of the IT managers had “never really thought about” what research actually is. He
perceived research solely “in the boundaries of how I experience it [in my day-to-day work],
which is typically work associated with research grants.” Although only three respondents had
PhDs, it was striking that both IT Services and the Research Office employed a relatively large
number of employees with such a degree, but that this seems to be less often the case in the
Library. Respondents thought this depended on the nature of the roles of these staff, which
was by and large deemed to be research-related. One of the research administrators also
thought it may be because of alternative career paths for postdocs:
I think there was quite a big push on staying in academia in terms of being a postdoc.
But it’s like a triangle, isn’t it? So as you go up that triangle, it gets harder and harder to
move up the ladder, because there’s fewer and fewer sort of academic positions and
academic roles higher up the scale. So I think naturally people have had to diversify a
bit and think about other routes to funding.
When asked how they would describe “research”, the answers were diverse and appeared to
be tied to the individual rather than their profession or seniority. The answers can be put into
seven categories:
- Research content and question,
- Research impact,
- Social environment of research,
- Research funding,
- Research method,
- Research output,
- Research ethics.
Most of the interviewees mentioned that research defines itself by the content of the research:
it is about the gathering of information and the pursuit of new knowledge. Many of the
respondents emphasised that this knowledge ought to be original: academic research is all
about finding something one hadn’t found before (research content). Another popular answer
– although none of the librarians mentioned it – was that research should benefit society
(research impact). Respondents scattered over all professional services also mentioned the
social environment of the researcher as a defining feature of what they thought research was.
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Some mentioned that research is about communicating, sharing and collaborating. Others, on
the contrary, considered research to be a lonely pursuit, done by researchers, research
associates or PhD students locked away in their offices. One of the librarians argued that this
depended on the discipline (social environment of research). For two managers in IT Services
and the Library funding was the only defining feature they mentioned, although both seemed
to be aware that not all research is funded externally. These respondents said they either
hardly ever interacted with academics, or only interacted with those on funded research
projects. Research methods, outputs and ethics were only mentioned by a small minority of
respondents.
Research Data Management
When respondents were asked to define RDM, a much clearer picture emerged: particular
topics seemed to be associated with particular professional stakeholders, and managerial
status was inconsequential. The most frequently mentioned topics were:
- Collection of data
- Storage of active data
- And storage of non-active data, including related security issues
Only a few respondents mentioned data sharing and open data as defining features of RDM,
and even fewer respondents indeed mentioned other features such as data management
planning and data lifecycles.
The storage of active data was largely a concern of IT professionals. They mentioned the issues
involved both in housing operational data, and in storing non-active data. They clearly viewed
RDM as predominantly (but not solely) a storage issue from a systems engineering perspective.
The emphasis lay on short-term storage. One of the respondents explained that in his
experience, academics are always concerned about storage for their operational data rather
than about issues involving metadata and data sharing. He argued that long-term storage and
data sharing are what most people may perceive of as RDM, but that it is only part of the story
and possibly not even the most pressing one:
Longer term, there’s the whole archival retrieval area and kind of support things, like
open data access, which is often what people think data management is: it’s about the
archival bit and it’s about linking data to research outputs, which is one aspect of it. But
29
for many people the things they struggle with is actually: how do I deal with the stuff
now? What is good practice?
Those working in the Research Office defined RDM mostly as the long term storage of non-
active data, and the sharing of these data. One of the respondents argued this was the whole
point of RDM:
As an institution we’ll create a lot data and information from academic research, and
it’s how we collate, store, and communicate that to other people either internally or
externally. So it’s all very well spending a lot of time doing a piece of research and
creating a lot of useful information if nobody else ever knows about it. The only way
new things come about is by collaboration with other people, and other people looking
at what you’ve done and trying to take that a step further.
Respondents from the Research Office also emphasised the limitations to open data, such as
ethical and moral obligations in relation to the Data Protection Act, and contractual obligations.
Such concerns were only mentioned in passing by only a very limited number of respondents
from the other service departments.
Librarians were more varied in their responses than the other stakeholder groups. The Open
Access officer defined RDM as an extension of her role, and followed the IT professionals’
division of RDM into active and non-active data. Both she and the metadata specialist
specifically highlighted the open data aspect of RDM, and emphasized the role of metadata in
data sharing:
How are you going to make your data useable by other people who don’t have your
background? So that has a lot to do with descriptions of the data, the sort of metadata
of it.
By contrast, Library managers defined RDM as a challenge. One of them saw the challenge not
in storage – “I don’t perceive storage of said data to be difficult, or indeed expensive in this day
and age” – but in advocacy:
I think part of the challenge is in the advocacy, and I don’t just mean the skilling-up of
library, information and computing people to deal with the situation, but advocacy as
far as the academics are concerned.
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Another respondent thought of RDM as the challenge of bringing all stakeholders together and
to define their roles:
I think it’s about working with the other stakeholders to define the roles and relation to
Research Data Management, because it’s the first thing that we’ve been an active
stakeholder in, that we can’t do on our own.
She found it frustrating that all involved knew what needs doing, but that it still remained
unclear who was going to do what: “We’re not used to working together.”
Personal professional drivers and barriers to engage in RDM
When respondents were asked about their own professional drivers and barriers to engage in
RDM, the answers could be grouped per professional service, with some similarities between
the Research Office and the Library, and with the Library again showing the most diverse
picture.
All respondents from IT Services answered that their prime drivers were short- and to a lesser
extent long-term storage and their benefits for the institution, and their most important barrier
was invariably the cost of that storage. One of the managers put it quite eloquently as “boringly
traditional IT stuff”:
I think ultimately we’re driven by the demands of what our customers want and the
things that they want is lots of cheap and easy to access data storage. I think it’s data
storage that’s the principle driver. And information security because obviously we need
to be very careful we don't have information breaches. So I’m afraid it's boringly
traditional IT stuff: it's the storing of information, and making it available to the
appropriate people. […] I tend to view it with my IT hat on, as I’m in the IT department,
rather than the broader objectives. I know what we’re trying to achieve in terms of data
sharing and improving research quality and so on, but they’re sort of side effects of
actually getting the technical bits right from my point of view anyway.
What these IT professionals agreed on, was that RDM should be seen as an opportunity. One of
the managers defined his drivers as an opportunity for all the central service departments to
provide a service “that is of benefit both to the institution and to individual members of staff
and research groups and departments, so they can actually do stuff better and more securely
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and more effectively and so on.” The interviewees were also unanimous on the barriers for
them to engage in RDM: the costs of storage and how these could be met. As regards to short-
term storage, respondents remarked they were having problems because academics perceived
the department’s charges to be too high. The long-term storage of non-active data was
considered to be a slightly different matter: one professional argued that IT Services are good
at costing “a particular compute problem” for using a particular high performance computer,
but that “we are not very good at the moment [at] costing up the process of archiving that
research data or looking after the research data management life cycle.”
The most important drivers for interviewees from the Research Office were attractiveness of
the University’s research for research funders (which includes compliance to their
requirements), and the quality of the research. One of the income capture officers explained
the first of these drivers as follows:
I think the only drivers for me at the moment are: is it important to the people who are
funding the research? And if it’s important to them, then it becomes important to me,
because at the moment that’s my main interest, that’s where we get our funding from,
be that government, EU, research councils. If they’re worried about research data
management, then I need to be aware of it and concerned about it as well.
The other respondents focused on research quality as the main driver for them to engage in
RDM:
From our angle, the main thing is its rigour. The angle of “Why are we doing this?”
Because it’s about enhancing the rigour of our research, and therefore the reputation of
our research.
The drivers for the librarians that were interviewed where of an altogether different nature.
Some of them had a pragmatic attitude and said that they would do what needed to be done or
what they were being told to do. Others referred to the library’s traditional role of providing
access to information, to the open access agenda, and to the Library’s educational role:
If you’re going to have a more open approach to research data, you need to organize it.
It needs to be described properly. […] It’s about knowledge, isn’t it, and about having it
organized enough so that people can find it, use it, evaluate it, reuse it, etc. And that’s
32
absolutely central to a librarian’s role. […] But also the training, the fact that we’re
good at signposting, providing guidance/training in handling information. That’s what
we do.
The liaison librarians focused more on what mattered directly to their roles. They highlighted
queries form academics as their most important driver, but at present they were getting hardly
any. In fact, one of them described it as “flogging a dead horse”:
It's kind of like: “Yes, we can go out and tell them this, but they’re not interested.”
The other issue they had was that they felt they had nothing to sell, such as a research data
repository for academics to use:
I think that’s quite hard as well, if people come to you and you say: “Well actually, we
can't do that, or we don't know how to do that, or that hasn't been invented yet.” I
think I’ll feel more confident when I think, at least for a proportion of people, I would be
able to say: “Yes actually, this is what you can do.”
A number of barriers were not specific to the Library, but common to more than one
profession. According to the interview data, the Library and the Research Office perceived a
lack of knowledge as a considerable barrier, either in general (“I don’t understand enough
about how it's done and why it's done, and who does it in the organization”) or for specific
topics, such as the university’s capacity to store research data or an understanding of the wide
variety of datasets and the type of metadata they might need. Another barrier that was shared
by the Research Office and the Library, was a perceived lack of steer and commitment from the
institution. Especially non-managerial staff in the Library were looking specifically for
“guidelines about what was expected of us and what they are expecting us to communicate to
the researchers.” But – as all respondents noticed – a lack of resourcing is probably the most
fundamental barrier:
You kind of can't do it on a shoestring, really, and I think we’re trying to do a lot on a
shoestring. And if you want to make an impact with something as difficult and as
complicated as RDM, I think actually you need to throw quite a lot of muscle at it and
have a kind of concerted action at it, and a bit of dedicated time and resource really.
33
Interviewees invariably identified a lack of resources in the form of staffing within their teams,
and in IT Services also as capital for infrastructure, as an important barrier for them to engage
in RDM. They also pointed at the fact that they had very little time to dedicate to RDM in their
current roles.
Contacts
Most respondents mentioned that they had limited to no contact with the other professional
services. One interviewee described it as living “in this bubble”. There were, however,
exceptions.
First, some non-managerial staff had roles that cut across various departments, such as the
Open Access officer in the Library. She had dealings with the Research Office because of
overlapping work areas but no contact with IT Services. Another cross-cutting role was the
officer within the Research Office who supports the University’s database of research outputs:
she dealt with IT Services about the technical infrastructure they supply, and with the Library
relating to the verification of publications for registration in the database. But she too
commented that contacts were limited.
Secondly, it emerged from the interviews that the more senior the member of staff, the more
contact they were likely to have with the other professional departments. These contacts
proved to be maintained at a higher level of the organization via formal committee structures,
and did not appear to trickle down substantially. As one of the IT managers put it:
We’re a highly technical environment here. The areas that I work in is a highly technical
environment. We may move up a level and then we start to become more “we want to
buy a service” and maybe that’s where the cultures may start to join up: non-technical
people on both sides may be looking at the sort of “We want to buy a service to do this.
How can we do that?”
Thirdly, it also emerged that contacts between the Library and IT Services were tighter at these
levels than their relationship with the central Research Office, despite the fact that the
institution does not have a converged information service where Library and IT form one
department. This was, for example, reflected in the existence of a joint liaison group at the
34
highest level of the institution, and a 24/7 library building that both services manage
collaboratively.
The main reason that was given for this general lack of communication and collaboration was a
lack of incentive, especially where there are no direct areas of overlap or where there is no
dependency on another department. Nevertheless, IT professionals thought they were in a
special position within the organization. One of them blamed the lack of communication with
the Library to the fact that “our service doesn’t have a dependency on the library services
itself”, but that it does work the other around: “a very large proportion of what [the IT
department] does is actually around all the business systems to support professional services.”
Precisely for this reason, IT professionals seemed to think that the department had a central
position:
It’s a funnel: there’s an awful lot of stuff swirl[ing] around. Ultimately when you want
something doing, it has to be down some tin [=hardware] and some software and it all
comes down to this funnel.
Contacts with the academic community appeared to be the mirror image of the communicative
situation between the departments: those in non-managerial liaison roles were often better
connected than those in managerial roles. One of the Library managers commented:
The academic, for me personally in my role, is the hardest, because I don’t deal with
academics directly.
She argued that this may be partly because the Library is traditionally perceived as not involved
in research, but in learning and teaching: the Library has no representation in the University’s
research committee, but is represented in the institution’s learning and teaching committee.
Those operating in dedicated liaison roles, by contrast, reported having a large amount of
contact, such as the liaison librarians in the Library, the income capture officers in the Research
Office, and research computing support in the IT department. There was however a difference
in the kind of academics they were liaising with. The research computing officer – who saw
himself both as an IT professional and as an academic – worked together with researchers and
research groups to find computational solutions for their research problems. The income
capture officers reported contact with researchers and research groups as well, but their
contact was limited to what they called the ‘pre-award’ period of a research project. The liaison
35
librarians claimed to have most of their contact with staff involved in teaching and learning,
and that directors of research or staff on research-only contracts were largely out of reach.
Views of the professional services
Because of the lack of contact and therefore first-hand knowledge of the other professional
services, most respondents had limited or largely stereotypical views of each other. One
respondent therefore emphasized that there were no real cultural differences between the
services:
I imagine they would be quite similar and the reason for that’s that personnel within IT
services are dedicated to the provision of a service which they want that to run at a high
quality, and they want to make sure that the customers that use that service are
satisfied. Yes. And I see a similar picture within the library. So within the library they’re
providing a service and they have a similar culture. I would imagine people within the
library want to provide a good quality, they don't want unhappy students.
Other respondents did point to differences in culture. They can be categorized as differences
relating to change, service orientation, formality, and collaboration.
Change
According to one of the Library managers, librarians are often risk averse and do not like
change:
I think librarians are more inclined to dot the Is and cross the Ts, and to be more
involved in the detail. Sometimes we’re a little bit risk averse because of that. I think [IT
Services] are less risk averse, and probably, as a department overall, more used to
change than we are.
She also argued that people in the Research Office were the least technically minded of all
professional service departments and that they would have trouble adapting to technical
change, especially if the University were to move from “black box systems and information
silos” to integrated systems, where it doesn’t matter “where the stuff is held, providing it can
all be integrated and pulled across to the right discovery system or whatever.”
36
Service orientation
Another point that the librarians highlighted was service orientation. Librarians saw themselves
as particularly service-orientated and they observed a relative lack of service orientation in the
other departments. As one of the managers put it:
The Library very much is very service orientated. Everything’s done for the benefit of the
customer, not for us. Our processes are there to support what we need to deliver to
customers, rather than processes convenient for us.
In their opinion, this service-orientated attitude was lacking in the IT department. Some of the
non-managerial staff characterised IT Services as “very different” to the Library in this respect:
They don't tend to work in a faculty-facing way, they tend to just deliver services to the
university. That’s the impression I get from dealing with them, my smaller bouts of
dealings with them. If they’ve got a new system […] they will just run training sessions
on [it]. They won't think: “Oh, how would a historian use [this system] or how would
this be relevant to such and such department?” Whereas I think in the Library we do a
lot more of that. It's all very tailored to what different people require. [IT Services] will
just say: “Well, there it is. Like it or lump it.”
One of the librarians theorized that this may be because IT Services had only in the last ten
years become involved in student support and that they were therefore relatively
unaccustomed to providing customer-facing services. One of the respondents from the
Research Office had similar insights: she thought research support had traditionally been lower
on the agenda of the IT department, “and students have been higher up”. One of the IT
managers agreed that research support was no longer a strong point of his department:
The old academic computing service, pretty much all it did was support research. They
were the only people interested in computing back in the 70s and 80s, but as time has
gone on, learning and teaching has very much taken over as one of the major activities
the department does. And then the way it merged with the administrative computing
service, that was another big chunk of activity. So the research support element has sort
of faded away a bit over the years. And I think, yes, it crept up on us without us realizing
as people retired and they weren't replaced and then voluntary severance and that kind
37
of thing and suddenly there’s hardly anyone left supporting research, which isn't very
good really.
Formality
Another characterization that many of the respondents used was the level of formality, for
example displayed in bureaucratic procedures and hierarchical structures. One of the librarians
described IT Services as “very project-orientated” and “quite bureaucratic”:
If you want anything done, you have to fill in a piece of paper and it goes into a general
melting pot.
This was also how one the IT professionals saw his own department. He contrasted it with the
Research Office – arguably the smallest of the three professional services and therefore less
bureaucratic and project-orientated:
I think our project management structure is fairly strong. We’re a large department so
we can support that, whereas [the Research Office] isn't. So the way that they manage
work streams is – I would say – a bit more ad hoc than the way that we do it.
Collaboration
From the interviews, the Research Office emerged as probably the most self-contained
department, mostly focused on the academic community but considerably less so on
collaboration with the other professional services and with Research Offices at other
universities. To illustrate this self-containment, some librarians observed a display of
boundaries around what the Research Office will get involved in:
I don't really know enough about how they work. My dealings with them has been very
much: “We do this, and if it's beyond this bit here, we are not dealing with it, that’s not
us”. Well, who is it then? “We don't know. It's not us.”
A similar picture emerged on a national level, where some argued that research administrators
have not yet developed good networks:
They don’t seem to collaborate. […] And in Libraries we’re very used to collaborating.
We have very good networks. I don’t think the networks are strong [in research
administration]. […] Librarians are quite happy to pinch ideas and build on them. I don’t
38
think that culture is the same in [the Research Office]. It is in [the IT department]:
they’re happy to pinch ideas and build on them, and everyone will do it. But in [the
Research Office]: no.
This lack of networking and collaboration could be caused, she argued, by research
administrators being acutely aware of IPR issues:
Maybe commercial sensitivity is more part of their culture than it is for us.
Indeed, one of the managers at the Research Office explicitly argued that as a research
administrator, you don’t want to share all your tricks with your competitors:
[You] look at ways to be competitive with other universities, and you are not going to
share that [with colleagues at other universities]. Whilst you are collaborating, you can
share some things, but you don’t want to share all your tricks.
Divisions of RDM roles and areas of overlap
The drivers and barriers mentioned earlier, and the way the professional services describe
themselves and others, relate to how professional services staff see the involvement of their
own teams and departments in RDM.
IT Services
When IT staff were asked to define their role in RDM, they highlighted first of all storage from
both an infrastructure (hardware) and an application (software) point of view, and secondly
guidance, training and support as the areas they were likely to get involved in.
One of the managers described their involvement as “providing sort of the bedrock either
directly or indirectly”. He saw the management of active data as “likely to be a discussion
between [IT Services] and the researchers themselves, to really tease out what their needs
are.” However, the management of non-active data was seen as a collaborative effort with the
Library, where the Library would take control of the “management of long term repositories”.
For him, a research data repository would be “just another system”. He added: “What is much
more difficult is to provide the capacity and the way in which the storage would be used for the
ongoing research.” Indeed, if providing the infrastructure for a long term repository was seen
as straightforward, the management of active data was perceived as a problem.
39
Advice, guidance and training was another service that IT professionals felt responsible for,
although they described it as a shared responsibility, especially with the Library:
Some of those sort of training type functions could slide across towards the library type
area, or they could expand within [the IT department] perhaps.
One of the IT managers was more specific. He saw the Library providing advice on metadata
“and those sorts of things”, and IT Services leading on “the systems side” as well as information
security and business continuity, because the department already has dedicated staff for these
issues.
Research Office
The two respondents from the Research Office’s income capture team saw their involvement in
RDM as limited. They did see signposting and advice on Data Management Plans as belonging
to their remit, although perhaps not their expertise, but RDM would not impact on their role in
any major way because they work “pre-award”:
The data is produced post-award, so the data is very much sort of out of our hands to a
certain extent, because it’s produced during the actual research project and analysed as
part of the research project.
They felt the research governance team would be more involved in RDM, because they operate
“post-award”. But the respondent from that team saw her involvement in a similar way to the
income capture officers: providing guidance, support, and awareness-raising. She agreed that
the income capture officers were likely to provide guidance on Data Management Plans, and
indicated that the Research Office may also have a role in providing training for doctoral
students and early career researchers.
In general the respondents from the Research Office preferred not to take the lead in RDM
activities, largely because they feel they are already quite pressed:
As an office, we’re probably looking to the Library to take the lead, partly because there
are so many other things we’re trying to do, and this is like another huge area.
There might also be other considerations:
40
We know we have to be building a research data management supporting structure,
but we don’t want to be so zealous that it costs so much or it has not that many
benefits, or there are benefits that are theoretical. Because there are a range of people
between zealots who think “Oh, it’s going to result in all researchers doing more
secondary data analysis, and their reputation is going to go up, we’ll have all these case
studies and everybody is going to be wanting to look at the data backing up the
findings.” Is that really going to happen? There are sceptics who are really: “Have
people got time to do that?”
There seem to be question marks over the costs and benefits of RDM which may prevent the
Research Office taking a more proactive approach. Respondents also argued that developing an
infrastructure and service activities is beyond their expertise: one of the Library managers
observed that it was mainly because of these “systems aspects” that the Research Office feel
they should not be too much involved.
Library
The Library, by contrast, seems willing to take the lead in RDM. One of the Library managers
described RDM as an integral part of the profession in the future:
Amplicating and helping to curate research data management is going to be vital to the
profession. I don’t have any doubt that that will be the case.
She argued that RDM is vital to the profession because providing access to academic
information is the Library’s main role, whether this information is bought in from publishers, or
produced by the university’s own academics:
We look after stuff; we look after academic stuff. I don’t want to trivialize it, but
research data is academic stuff in one form or another. I know it could be a printed
notebook or it could be a really complex experimental output, it could be raw data, it
could be publications, all sorts of stuff. We’re in the business of looking after whatever
this institution puts out into the world, and not just in the business of buying stuff in
from elsewhere.
The librarians in our sample generally saw their involvement in the long term storage and
preservation of research data, but not in the storage and management of active data. Especially
41
the preservation of data was identified as an area where at present the Library was the only
likely stakeholder that was interested in the area, which is something “that annoys us hugely”.
For one of the managers in particular, digital preservation was at the top of the list:
Because digital preservation is something libraries have been a bit slow on. Because
we’ve been very focused on print in the past. You don’t have to do it for that. I think
we’re waking up to the idea now that, well actually, if we don’t start preserving stuff
and looking at things like fixity and file formats and all the rest of it, in 20 years’ time,
we’ll have a load of stuff and we won’t be able to look at it. So far, it has really only
manifested itself in: “Well, perhaps we’ve got some textbooks with CDs in the back and
they’re written for Windows 95. Nobody can read them anymore.” It’s little things like
that. But for huge, big data sets, that would be slightly more important. Really
important.
Providing guidance, training and support was identified as a role for the liaison librarians. As
one of them said:
There is no two ways about it: we’re mainly sales people, aren't we? We mainly turn up
and go: “Hey, what do you need? Do you need to buy some books? Right, I can buy you
some books.” And go away and do it.
Areas of overlap and competition
When respondents were asked to identify any areas of overlap or even conflict and
competition between the three main professional services in RDM, not all respondents
identified areas of overlap or were prepared to talk in terms of conflict and competition:
I wouldn’t say competition in its most blatant sense. I’m sure everybody wants to do
[RDM] and everybody wants it to be done in the best possible way for the institution. I
don’t think anybody yet knows how to do it in the best possible way, so people say,
“Why don’t we do this?” or, “Why don’t we do that?” And I don’t really think that’s
competition. I think that’s people thinking, “Well, you know, that might get the ball
rolling,” or, “That might be a good idea to start off with.”
Others, however, did see a competitive element:
42
I can see that competition will come into it […]. If it was me personally I’d say, “no”. But
in reality I think, “yes”. There will be competition and that’s part of the problem. There
is a bit of jostling for position over this.
One of the IT managers referred to varying priorities between the departments as a possible
source of friction, especially where there are interdependencies:
I think there’s scope for confusion because though those three organizations are
complementary, they’re not part of one single unified unit. So I think there are some
potential issues around coordination, confusion and chaos and those sorts of things.
We’ll have the usual things that maybe [the Research Office] want to do one thing that
relies on us doing something that maybe is lower down on the list of priorities, and you
probably get the usual clashes of prioritization […]. So if you’re going to get conflicts,
it’s more likely to go with that sort of thing, that the three departments are a bit
uncoordinated in their activities and suddenly find they rely on somebody else to do
something who has not thought about it, so you get delays and recriminations and
those sorts of things.
Furthermore, there were 4 areas of overlap and contention that respondents identified:
systems specifications; training, advice, and guidance; leadership; and branding.
Overlap: systems specifications
One of the Library managers mentioned storage as an area of overlap. After all, both in the IT
department and the Library there are “systems people” with expertise in “the technical
infrastructure”. They may both be involved in defining the specifications for storage systems.
This would also be true for the Research Office. In particular, they need to be involved in the
specification of the metadata that needs to be collected from funded research projects:
[The Research Office], as far as the institution is concerned, are at the front of the
process. Whatever systems they’re using, has to capture the information that
everybody else needs at the backend of the process, or indeed in the middle. An
example would be stuff about grants. […] If it’s not captured and if it is not captured in
a systematic way – so it’s not in the right fields, in the right place – then it can’t be put
in later on.
43
On another level, long-term data storage would be a shared responsibility where – as we have
seen above – the technical infrastructure and the archival and preservation processes may
have to be shared between the Library and the Research Office. Indeed, such overlapping
processes already exist in the current repository for research publications. This is first of all a
case of interdependencies, which require clearly defined processes:
That’s always been a slightly tricky area, because when you’re passing stuff off between
departments, you’ve got to have really robust, uniform workflows to make sure that
that happens. I think it’s fair to say hitherto we have not had those.
Overlap: training, advice and guidance
Most respondents signalled an overlap in the provision of training, advice and guidance. It was
generally assumed that all three departments would be involved, but that there was a danger
that the information they provide would be inconsistent:
I mean we’ve got to be very careful that we don't have contradictory messages out
there. We just need to make sure it’s the same message to everybody wherever it’s
coming from.
Respondents referred to a natural division of roles between the departments, although they
identified areas of overlap nonetheless:
I think there are more specific functions, certainly if you’re looking at technology then
it's much more [the IT department’s] area than other people. If you look at policy
around research grants management, it’s [the Research Office]. If you look at
information management type stuff, then the Library is probably better placed. But I
think there are some overlaps.
Some of the overlaps that were mentioned, were:
- guidance about “how to go about managing the actual data”, which could overlap
between the Library and the income capture officers in the Research Office who assist
researchers with their Data Management Plans,
- guidance about ethical considerations, which was mentioned as a shared concern of
the Library and the Research Office’s governance team,
44
- guidance about data security, which at this institution is embedded in the IT
department, but – as one of the respondents of the Research Office mentioned –
“there’s no reason that other people couldn’t be told and be able to provide advice
upon ways of storing data securely. I suppose there are really common things that all
researchers are going to know […].”
Competition: leadership
Less an area of overlap than an area of competition is the question of RDM leadership. One of
the IT managers identified RDM as “quite a major area and it is quite high profile” which could
be both an opportunity and a poisoned chalice. It is an opportunity, he argued, because “there
is a big demand out there for help” and “it is an important part of our role to actually provide
that for people”:
So from that point of view, it’s an opportunity to actually provide the university with
stuff that’s of benefit both to the institution and to individual members of staff and
research groups and departments, so they can actually do stuff better and more
securely and more effectively and so on.
However, RDM could be seen as a hazardous area of work, “a poisoned chalice”: “the last thing
you want to be doing is leading on it, because it will just end in tears and be horrible, so
backing off is the best strategy”. He therefore did not think that the professional services would
be fighting over it. Indeed, he identified a number of dangers in the RDM arena. First, there are
“quite senior people” who are saying that the Research Councils “have been asking us to do
this for years and years and they have never done anything about this at all, so why should we
run around and spend a fortune and do that?” At the same time, there are senior people who
are happy to engage in RDM, which makes it difficult to know “where we are from the point of
view of the central approach” in the university. Secondly, the appraisal of digital data – the
selection of data to be preserved in the long term – is problematic and a potential issue that
might reflect negatively on the professional services:
Those are the real challenges: if we’re going to keep things, it’s not so much even a
question of where do we keep it, it’s: what do we actually keep, what’s of value? And
the view in some quarters is that 99% of data is actually useless and you might as well
just throw it away. So that’s the poisoned chalice bit, I think. And if you can make all
45
that work then fantastic, but if you just end up annoying loads of people then that's
pretty bad.
Competition: branding
Lastly, a Library manager suggested there may be competition over the branding of the RDM
support service:
It will be over silly little things like where to host the web page, because that seems to
matter: Whose brand is it going to be? It’s around the branding, I think, where the most
competition will arise, because: which URL? […] It will be at that level.
6. Discussion
None of the professional services will have all expertise required. RDM is therefore widely
considered a collaborative effort between at least the library, IT services and the research
support office (Jones et al.,2013; Hodson&Jones,2013). This shared RDM arena can be seen as
an unclaimed “Third Space” in between the professions involved, where staff from different
professional cultures and departments meet (Whitchurch,2012,2008). Such Third Spaces
“involve interactions between people who would not normally have worked together, where
those interactions are focused on a shared (often novel) object (concept, problem, idea)”
(McAlpine&Hopwood,2009,p.159). The actors in this RDM space will need to find a modus
operandi for their collaborative provision of an integrated service. However, Third Spaces are
often considered to be full of tension (Whitchurch,2012; Macfarlane,2011; Shelley,2010;
Collinson,2006,2007; McInnes,1998; Bhabha,1994,1990). After all, the different actors may
pursue their own agendas and have their own professional cultures that may not be
compatible. They are also not used to collaboration with each other: in many institutions it may
be the first time that the three professional services work closely together. This was certainly
the case in the HEI of this case study. Some interviewees even argued that the emergence of
the RDM agenda – in particular an RDM scoping project that had been undertaken between
September 2011 and August 2012 – had been First Contact with the other services.
From the interviews, it emerged that respondents should not only be classified according to
their profession, but also according to their specific role and their seniority. The differences in
professional identity between managerial and non-managerial staff were already noted for IT
46
professionals by Barley (1996), who distinguishes “buffers” from “brokers”, and by Loogma et
al. (2004), who developed a gliding scale between “geeks” and “transgressors”. Managerial IT
professionals combine disciplinary knowledge with generic management and communication
skills, with the latter skills being more important and the former fading away as time
progresses. They are also likely to identify more with the organizational vision
(Ramachandran&Rao,2006). The interviews showed that this was the case for all professional
groups. The managers in the sample usually had regular formal contact with the other
professional services, but only on their own level of seniority. Staff in non-managerial roles
were more likely to work in silos, although some staff in cross-cutting roles were slightly better
connected. What emerges most of all is that through a relative lack of interaction, the majority
of the interviewees were ill informed about the other professional services. Those who were
interviewed, had clearly not yet entered RDM’s potential Third Space.
What the three professional services had in common was a shared commitment to service
delivery. This was most clearly worded by one of the IT professionals, who claimed there could
be no significant difference between the professional cultures because all were committed “to
the provision of a service which they want to run at a high quality, and they want to make sure
that the customers that use that service are satisfied.” However, the nature of the services and
the customers they aim to satisfy are different, as are the relationships that the respondents
perceived to have with the other professional services.
First, the Research Office mainly focuses on the research community, in particular that part of
the community that is or wants to be in receipt of external research funding. Several
respondents suggested that staff in the Research Office may not be inclined to share good
practice with their wider profession because of the competitive nature of research funding
between institutions. By contrast, respondents from the Library and IT Services seemed to
highly value such exchanges and did not express any concerns regarding competition with
other HEIs.
Secondly, although IT Services serve the entire academic community, in the past their focus has
shifted from research computing to student support, up to the point that research support is
no longer a well-developed service. It is a contradiction that at the same time many librarians
perceived IT Services to be less service-orientated than the Library. Furthermore, IT Services
defined themselves with a slight feeling of superiority – in the sense of Trice’s ethnocentrism –
47
as the “funnel” through which all information has to pass in general, and as the “bedrock” of
any RDM service in particular: IT Services are the only professional department that provides a
service to the other professional departments, and there are therefore relationships of
interdependency with both the Library and the Research Office. IT Services also proved unique
in their emphasis on costing and pricing of storage solutions for researchers, which they clearly
felt to be a problem area. Neither the Research Office nor the Library charge for their services;
charging for any services was not brought up by any of these respondents. It seems therefore
that the attitude towards resourcing services, including future RDM services, is fundamentally
different between the three departments.
Lastly, the Library has undergone a similar development as IT Services, where the traditional
access and research support roles have had to make way for a focus on information literacy
training and involvement in education rather than research (Auckland,2012). Respondents
referred to this development, and also signalled that a process of deskilling had taken place
where “lower grade” roles such as traditional collection management and cataloguing had
been outsourced. From all respondents, the Library emerged as more explicitly uncertain and
concerned about its role in the institution and in RDM in particular, than the other professional
departments. Librarians were also the least well informed about academic research. The
number of staff with PhDs, for example, was significantly lower than in the Research Office and
IT Services, both in the sample of this study and in the whole population.
From the interviews in this case study, the Research Office emerged as an outsider within the
triumvirate of the professional services, less well linked with the other professional services,
and more focused on research support than those other services. The Library and IT Services,
on the other hand, were more closely related departments, each with a more established
professional network than the research support office.
These differences in the nature of the services provided and the perceived interrelationships
between the departments were reflected in the different views of RDM that the respondents
expressed, the drivers and barriers they encountered, and how they thought the tasks should
be divided. Predictably, respondents from IT Services defined RDM predominantly as the
storage of active and non-active data. This was a distinction that was only very infrequently
made by respondents from the other services. The drivers they identified were – again –
providing storage both short- and the long-term, but they viewed this explicitly as an
48
infrastructure issue, not as a an issue involving the management of the data held within that
infrastructure. Storage to them is a systems implementation.
Respondents from the Library and the Research Office were not concerned with the short-term
storage of active data, but with the long-term storage of non-active data and with data sharing.
One of the IT professionals summed up the difference: the Library and the Research Office are
interested in the end product, whereas the IT department focuses on the entire lifecycle, “right
the way from the start or even the pre-start, because you have to fathom what it is you want to
do and store and how you are going to do it, all the way through to the end product.” However,
as far as the drivers are concerned, there were differences between the Research Office and
the Library. Respondents from the Research Office saw the attractiveness of the institution’s
research to research funders and the associated issue of research quality as the main driver to
engage in RDM, whilst not all librarians had an intrinsic driver and some of the non-managerial
staff seemed reluctant to engage in RDM. However, especially managerial staff formulated
engagement in RDM as an opportunity, suited to the Library’s traditional access role, its
existing skills in information management, and its championship of open access and digital
preservation. Importantly, they also considered it to be an integral part of the profession –
something that none of the other professions commented on.
These observations highlight some of characteristics of the three professional cultures and
their likely agendas, in so far as they emerged from the interviews. The relationships between
the professional services and the way they perceive a plausible division of RDM roles can be
used to gauge the extent to which RDM may lead to Abbottonian jurisdictional conflicts.
Through the interviews a fairly clear picture emerged of a division of roles between the
stakeholders, and some areas of overlap. They are summarized in Figure 4 using the DCC’s
overview of components of an RDM infrastructure (Jones et al.,2013).
49
Research Office
IT Services
LibraryResearch Office
IT Services
LibraryResearch Office
IT Services
?
Figure 4 Division of likely roles for the three main professional services in RDM.
When professional services staff were asked what RDM skills they already possessed in a
University of Nottingham survey (Williamson,2013), the only overlapping “data management”
areas were data management planning and data preservation. In the present case study,
however, a different picture emerges: respondents considered data management planning as
the domain of the Research Office, and data preservation de facto of the Library. What the
Nottingham survey and this case study have in common, is the identification of IT Services as
the main department involved in storage. It is clear from the interviews that IT Services are the
only service focusing on active data. The division of roles regarding the management of long-
term non-active data (data selection and handover, data repositories, data catalogues) and
guidance, training and support were more ambiguous.
Firstly, none of the interviewees identified appraisal – selection of the data to be preserved for
the long term – as belonging to their remit, although many were aware of the problematic
nature of appraisal, especially in IT Services. One of the IT managers saw it as a “poisoned
chalice”, because academics are unlikely to welcome rigorous selection of their data. It may
very well be for this reason that none of the respondents thought their departments would be
50
responsible for it. Secondly, it became clear that training, advice and guidance were likely to be
a joint venture, but that there was a danger of inconsistency. Thirdly, as far as data repositories
and catalogues are concerned, some division of tasks seemed to emerge: IT Services providing
the technical infrastructure, the Library managing the repository, and the Research Office
capturing some of the information needed. Arguably, managing a repository could involve
appraisal (although, as mentioned before, none of the librarians discussed the topic) and it
could also involve data preservation. This emerged as an activity that only the Library was
interested in, but according to one of the Library managers preservation would not necessarily
have to be a task of the Library. Finally, librarians identified RDM as a likely integral part of
librarianship, and they highlighted the alignment of RDM tasks with current Library expertise.
Nevertheless, they argued for a revaluation of cataloguing and metadata skills, which had been
delegated to lower grade jobs or had been outsourced and which would be particularly useful
for the Library’s engagement with RDM. They perceived of RDM as an extension of the Library’s
role in open access to publications, which combines championship of the open access ideology
with skills and interest in repository management, including related issues of digital
preservation and metadata. This would clearly constitute an extension of existing library access
roles to include digital data. One of the Library managers described this as a question of
provenance: adding information that is produced by the institution’s academics to the Library’s
traditional remit of providing access to information bought in from elsewhere.
It would appear that any conflict over professional jurisdiction in an Abbottonian sense, would
most likely involve IT Services and the Library, as the two departments that are most closely
related. An ongoing jurisdictional conflict between these two professions is already known
form the literature (e.g. Cox&Corral,2013; O’Connor,2009; Ray,2001; Danner,1998; Van
House&Sutton,1996). In this particular case study, the interviews suggested that the Library
was indeed keen to extend its jurisdiction into RDM, more so than IT Services. IT professionals
seemed to consider RDM from their usual perspective as deliverers of an infrastructure as a
(paid for) service, and they did not appear to be enthusiastic to expand that role into the actual
management of data. Indeed, the Library was already proactively taking the lead: they had
designed the institution’s RDM policy, and were leading the institution’s efforts to implement
an RDM service. As one of the IT managers said: “The library seem very keen to lead on it and I
think the rest of us are quite happy to sit back and let them do it.”
51
This does not mean that the Library is fighting for “full jurisdiction” over RDM; Abbott defines
full jurisdiction as full control over an area of work, subordinating the other professions
involved. It would rather seem that the parties are working towards a “divided jurisdiction”: a
situation where the dispute ends in a standoff and in a more or less equal division of labour
between interdependent parts. The evidence showed that there was scope for conflict
between the professional services, such as those resulting from varying priorities in
interdependent relationships, and possibly even some form of competition over issues such as
the branding of the service, but that on a higher managerial level the benefit to the
organization might very well prevail over professional dispute.
7. Conclusions
As Abbott’s theory predicts, RDM may be considered an arena where various professions meet
and vie for jurisdiction over a newly emerged area of work. However, of all stakeholders
involved, the Library of this case study was the only professional department trying to claim a
new jurisdiction in RDM. The Library’s pro-active move into this area reflects an already long-
standing movement within the profession to extend its jurisdiction into a more IT-based
direction, into Information Literacy, and into research support, including open access for
research publications. The interviews support this interpretation: they show that the Library
sees its involvement mainly as a provider of access to research data via a repository, and as a
provider of training, guidance and support to the research community. RDM can therefore be
seen as a new area of work for the Library in the form of an extension of areas of work it has
recently moved into. Although this move into RDM may represent a claim to a new jurisdiction,
there was no evidence from the interviews that this was the result of a full-blown Abbottonian
struggle between competing professions. The departments in this case study were happy with
the Library’s lead; they claimed to be short of resources to take on such a complex project, and
some feared RDM may be a “poisoned chalice”. Respondents noticed there is scope for
conflict, but only based on the usual tensions between interdependent teams or based on non-
fundamental issues such as branding. It appears that the benefit to the institution outweighs
professional dispute, at least on the level of managerial staff. Their allegiance proved to be
more equally divided between the profession and the institution than for many non-managerial
staff, who predominantly work in their own silos. In that sense, the Library claims its new
jurisdiction as a primus inter pares (first among equals). It would therefore seem that the
52
Library’s willingness to enter a new area of work (seen as an opportunity), combined with the
relative reluctance of other stakeholders to lead on RDM, and a shared concern for the
common good of the organization, does not result in an Abbottonian struggle over power.
The present study has its limitations: it is a case study of a single research intensive university
that has a centralized research support office, and that does not have a converged service
where Library and IT Services are organizationally (but not necessarily culturally) combined.
Other institutions will have different constellations and different existing relationships between
the professional services prior to the emergence of the RDM agenda. In some institutions the
Library will not take the lead on RDM. Different pictures may therefore emerge if HEIs which
are not research intensive are taken into account. A further limitation is that the evidence was
gathered from a relatively small number of respondents, with emphasis on the Library. Future
qualitative and quantitative studies of other HEIs will have to tell whether the finding of this
case study that RDM is not a battlefield between adjacent professions over jurisdiction, applies
to other institutions.
53
Abbreviations
ARMA, Association or Research Managers and Administrators, http://www.arma.ac.uk/
BCS, British Computer Society, The Chartered Institute for IT, http://www.bcs.org/
CILIP, Chartered Institute or Library and Information Professionals, http://www.cilip.org.uk/
DCC, Digital Curation Centre, http://www.dcc.ac.uk/
HEI, Higher Education Institution
RDM, Research Data Management
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Appendix A: Interview protocol
About the interviewee’s professional identity
What is your job title and role?
Do you see yourself as a librarian/research administrator/IT professional/etc.?
What does that mean to you?
What are your day to day activities?
What main skills do you need? Attitudes? Knowledge base?
How does it bring you into contact with other professional groups: academics, library,
computing services, research office, and records management?
What are your relations with these professional services like?
How would you characterise the working culture in these professional services?
How did you get into the profession?
How has your career unfolded?
How do you perceive the future?
About research
How do you define research?
Do you have any personal experience of research?
Do you see yourself as a researcher?
In what ways do you or your team support research?
About Research Data Management
What is RDM, according to you?
What is your own role in RDM? How does it fit into what you already do?
What is the role of your team in RDM? What about other teams in your department,
how are they involved in RDM?
What is the role of your professional service in RDM?
Do you think RDM will require a reorganisation of your team/department?
What skills and attitudes do you need in order to provide research data management
services?
55
What are – both for you personally and for your team/department – the key drivers to
engage in RDM?
And the key challenges?
How do you see the relationship between the main support services regarding RDM,
both realistically and ideally?
How do you see the institution handling RDM in a few years’ time, both realistically and
ideally?
56
Appendix B: Participant Information Sheet
Research Project Title: RDMRose, Research Data Management for information professionals
Invitation
You are being invited to take part in a research project. Before you decide it is important for
you to understand why the research is being done and what it will involve. Please take time to
read the following information carefully and discuss it with others if you wish. Ask us if there is
anything that is not clear or if you would like more information. Take time to decide whether or
not you wish to take part. Thank you for reading this.
1. What is the project’s purpose?
RDMRose is a JISC funded project to produce taught and continuing professional development
(CPD) learning materials in Research Data Management (RDM) tailored for Information
professionals.
RDMRose will develop and adapt learning materials about RDM to meet the specific needs of
liaison librarians in university libraries, both for practitioners’ CPD and for embedding into the
postgraduate taught (PGT) curriculum. Its deliverables will include Open Educational Resources
(OER) suitable for learning in multiple modes, including face to face and self-directed learning.
Thus those using our learning materials could be practicising librarians or Full time PG students.
RDMRose brings together the UK’s leading iSchool with a practitioner community based on the
White Rose University Consortium’s libraries at the Universities of Leeds, Sheffield and York.
Development of content and teaching will be iterative, based on a highly participative
curriculum development process and with a strong strand of student evaluation of learning
materials and activities.
In order to evaluate the project’s impact in a rounded way, we want to
1) Investigate LIS professionals’ responses to the learning materials
2) Explore the attitudes of the various stakeholders in RDM to potential library roles
2. Why have I been chosen?
57
You are someone who is involved or could be involved in Research Data Management. We
want to ask you your opinions about RDM and the potential library role in it, in particular.
3. Do I have to take part?
It is up to you to decide whether or not to take part. Declining to participate will not in any way
affect your marks (should you be taking the module for accreditation). If you do decide to take
part you will be given this information sheet to keep (and in the case of interviews be asked to
sign a consent form) and you can still withdraw at any time without it affecting any benefits
that you are entitled to in any way. You do not have to give a reason.
4. What will happen to me if I take part?
We will ask you to participate in an in-depth interview, in which we will ask you open ended
questions about your perspective on Research Data Management. If you agree an audio
recording of the interview will be made.
5. What do I have to do?
There will be no lifestyle restrictions as a result of participating.
6. What are the possible disadvantages and risks of taking part?
Participating in the research is not anticipated to cause you any disadvantages or discomfort.
7. What are the possible benefits of taking part?
Whilst there are no immediate benefits for those people participating in the project, it is hoped
that this work will help improve the learning materials we are creating and have a beneficial
impact on how RDM is supported in your institution.
8. What happens if the research study stops earlier than expected?
Should the research stop earlier than planned we will tell you and explain why.
9. What if something goes wrong?
58
If you have any complaints about the project in the first instance you can contact the principal
investigator, Andrew Cox (details below). If you feel your complaint has not been handled to
your satisfaction you can contact the University’s ‘Registrar and Secretary’.
10. Will my taking part in this project be kept confidential?
All the information that we collect about you during the course of the research will be kept
strictly confidential. You will not be able to be identified in any reports or publications. Any
data collected about you, such as audio recordings or transcripts of interviews, will be stored in
a secure filing cabinet or on a secure computer in anonymised form.
11. Will I be recorded, and how will the recorded media be used?
Any audio recordings of your activities made during this research will be used only for analysis
and for illustration in conference presentations and lectures. No other use will be made of
them without your written permission, and no one outside the project will be allowed access to
the original recordings.
Data collected for the project will be destroyed at the close of the project.
12. What type of information will be sought from me and why is the collection of this
information relevant for achieving the research project’s objectives?
Through interviews, we want to ask about views and opinions about RDM. Understanding the
views of the various stakeholders in RDM will help us better understand the context in which
we are operating and so better evaluate the project’s impact.
13. What will happen to the results of the research project?
Results of the research will be published. You will not be identified in any report or publication.
If you wish to be given a copy of any reports resulting from the research just ask us to put you
on our circulation list.
14. Who is organising and funding the research?
The project is being undertaken by the Information School, University of Sheffield and is partly
funded by JISC, http://www.jisc.ac.uk.
59
15. Who has ethically reviewed the project?
This project has been ethically approved by the Information School’s ethics review procedure.
The University’s Research Ethics Committee monitors the application and delivery of the
University’s Ethics Review Procedure across the University.
16. Contacts for further information
Andrew Cox, Information School, Regent Court, University of Sheffield. tel: 0114 2226347
email: [email protected]
The University’s Registrar and Secretary is Dr. Philip Harvey. He can be contacted at the
following address: Dr. Philip Harvey, The Registrar and Secretary’s Office, University of
Sheffield, Firth Court, Western Bank, Sheffield S10 2TN.
If you decide to participate: do keep a copy of this information sheet and of your signed
consent form & thank you for participating!
60
Appendix C: Consent Form
Title of Research Project: RDMRose
Name of Researcher: Andrew Cox
Participant Identification Number for this project:
1. I confirm that I have read and understand the information sheet dated 15 October 2012
explaining the above research project and I have had the opportunity to ask questions about
the project.
2. I understand that my participation is voluntary and that I am free to withdraw at any time
without giving any reason and without there being any negative consequences. In addition,
should I not wish to answer any particular question or questions, I am free to decline. The lead
researcher is Andrew Cox, 0114 2226347 [email protected].
3. I understand that my responses will be kept strictly confidential. I give permission for
members of the research team to have access to my anonymised responses. I understand that
my name will not be linked with the research materials, and I will not be identified or
identifiable in the report or reports that result from the research.
4. I agree for the data collected from me to be used in future research.
5. I agree to take part in the above research project.
6. I agree to an audio recording being made of the interview
________________________ ________________ ____________________
Name of Participant Date Signature
(or legal representative)
_________________________ ________________ ____________________
Name of person taking consent Date Signature
(if different from lead researcher)
61
To be signed and dated in presence of the participant
_________________________ ________________ ____________________
Lead Researcher Date Signature
To be signed and dated in presence of the participant
Copies:
Once this has been signed by all parties the participant should receive a copy of the signed and
dated participant consent form, the letter/pre-written script/information sheet and any other
written information provided to the participants. A copy of the signed and dated consent form
should be placed in the project’s main record (e.g. a site file), which must be kept in a secure
location.
62
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