5 BMU: Starting Out on the Wrong Foot
As Dr. Carol Quinlan started work on her RDS project, she felt intimidated and overwhelmed at all the information she had to collect, people she had to meet, and tasks to perform and ended up taking a few days just to sit in her office and think, jot down notes, and sort through her ever-expanding email Inbox. She soon realized that she wasn’t going to get very far without first understanding the current situation at her campus library, and it would help to just start talking with people to get a sense of where things stood before going much farther.
After collecting her thoughts and sorting through all the information on her to-do list, Dr. Quinlan emailed Topper Harley, the head of the BMU Library IT Department, to talk about some of the trainings that had been done over the past two years. She found out that he and his team do some basic computer skills sessions that cover things like Microsoft Office, OneNote, and how to access the Library’s suite of digital tools and services as well as how to edit LibGuides. While much of this did not relate specifically to Research Data Services, Dr. Quinlan did find their discussion to be useful since Topper clearly had a great deal of institutional experience and knew how to organize and conduct training sessions. Carol and Topper discussed how he could help her with promoting some professional development sessions, using the hardware and software in the training room, and working with IT staff to deal with computer issues that can crop up over time.
Dr. Quinlan decided that her next step in planning her Research Data Services program was to start putting together some workshops for OpenRefine, a software application for working with somewhat messy data sets. She was quite familiar with this tool and had used it extensively throughout her Ph.D. program, and figured it would be a good way to really get her RDS program off the ground. She worked with Topper to set up some workshops in the library training room, and also called Ahmed Rahul, the library Communications Specialist, to get the program listed in the weekly Library e-newsletter.
Not long after Dr. Quinlan started to get the ball rolling with all of this, she got a Slack message from her department head Kacie Murtaz asking about the OpenRefine sessions that were on the Library calendar. Instead of congratulating her on a job well done, Kacie wondered why Dr. Quinlan was doing these workshops in the first place and she appeared to be somewhat confused by the whole matter. She wasn’t upset, just confused, and asked if they could meet the next day to discuss the situation.
Dr. Quinlan was worried going into the Kacie’s office the next day, and confused about why this meeting was even happening. As it turns out, the Library already had a series of workshops for some data-management software including OpenRefine, and the trainings that Dr. Quinlan had planned were going to be almost entirely redundant. After clearing up the initial confusion, the two colleagues had a pleasant, productive, and respectful conversation about how Dr. Quinlan could adjust things going forward and come up with some workshops and training programs that were better suited to what the Library and the University really needed.
While the experience was a little unnerving, it did give Dr. Quinlan a new perspective on developing her Research Data Services program. She learned that, first and foremost, her department head was on her side, believed in her, and wanted her to succeed. Kacie wasn’t upset about the OpenRefine trainings, just confused, and once the two of them got that sorted out things went much more smoothly. Dr. Quinlan decided to slow things down, way down, and learn as much as she could about the current situation before making any big plans. She needed to know what was being taught so as not to make the same mistake that she did with OpenRefine, as well as spend time getting to know the people in her team, at her library, and on the campus in general. This would mean her Research Data Services might take a bit longer to get up and running, but it would be well worth it in the long run.