Last week I had a really good conversation about my RDM consulting offerings with a friend who is in an allied health field, is self-employed, and has been out of academia for a while. As I continue to refine my consulting services page and reach out to colleagues about what I’m doing, it has been really good to talk to a variety of people about what I do.
My friend had trouble wrapping her head around this admittedly broad slate of things I offer as an RDM consultant. With good reason: at one point she said that my consulting services page was trying to do an awful lot, perhaps too much, and I immediately agreed. Now, there are reasons the page needs to be set up the way it is, in order to facilitate my current marketing work, but before I settled on the current version, I had been wrestling with how to slice this slate of possibilities in a way that would make sense on a webpage. She and I agreed that having ancillary pages or posts about what this means for people in different roles, kinds of institutions, etc, would be really helpful for people like her who have less background on the concepts. The way she thought about it was, understandably, to drill down into whether I could offer particular things she could conceive of needing help with, as a researcher with data, even as she said that she knew she was probably missing chunks of the bigger picture by drilling down.
It was a really good conversation because I get accustomed to talking to data services librarians about this domain of knowledge and practice, and I get used to talking to faculty consumers of these services as well. Those folks have more starting context about grants and data management plans and storage options and data sharing agreements, but it’s important to be able to explain what I do to people who don’t have that insider knowledge. It’s also going to help me to formulate guidance for people who know they need someone like me for a project, but who are struggling with how to explain to their own administration why to put money on this. That’s where my self-employed allied health friend had a great outside perspective that was confused, sure, but also really excited to understand.
But before I get into some more specific ways of slicing what I do up into what it might mean for people in particular roles, situations, with particular problems or needs, I’m thinking more generally about faceting. That is: what are the characteristics of an RDM consulting need, that I can use to slice things by?
I can start with some of the ways I thought about slicing up my consulting offerings:
- Where in the institution is the need arising? Sponsored Research Office, Individual PI/LAB, Library unit, IT unit, etc.
- What kind of circumstance is the need? Backfilling for retirement, open position, sudden glut of work in an area that’s normally quiet, longer-term or larger-scale planning or program design need, etc. (Note how this overlaps with a possible facet about expertise gaps that organizations face. No, I’m not sure how to deal with that yet. Just making a note.)
- What sort of tasks does the need involve: DMP help, setting up a tool, planning for and/or setting up a service or program, data handling (cleaning/validation/wrangling/etc), training.
You get the idea, and as an introductory post this isn’t meant to be exhaustive. But it’s a way I’m thinking about for framing the kinds of work that I do, because RDM touches so many people and processes in an institution, and the needs therefore have to be made clear to a variety of people.
A work in progress, yes. But a great place to start.