Teaching Research Data Management with the New England Collaborative Data Management Curriculum: Curriculum

The Lamar Soutter Library and partnering New England libraries have addressed the gap in data management education for students in the sciences by developing the New England Collaborative Data Management Curriculum, an instructional tool for teaching data management best practices to undergraduates, graduate students, and researchers in the health sciences, sciences, and engineering disciplines. The curriculum’s seven modules align with the National Science Foundation’s data management plan recommendations and address universal data management challenges. Each of the modules can be taught as a stand-alone class or as part of a series of classes. Instructors are welcome to customize the content of the instructional modules to meet the learning needs of their students and the policies and resources at their institutions. Built upon the Frameworks for a Data Management Curriculum, NECDMC includes a collection of actual research cases that provides a discipline specific context to the content of the instructional modules.

In 2010-2011, the Lamar Soutter Library at the University of Massachusetts Medical School and the George C. Gordon Library at Worcester Polytechnic Institute collaborated on an Institute of Museum and Library Service (IMLS) National Leadership Planning grant and developed an instructional framework and delivery system for openly accessible, online instructional modules on preserving, managing, and sharing digital data. The two libraries also conducted research on user requirements for data repositories for student generated data and tested the usability of three open source repository software systems.