“We’re New, Want to Talk?”: Conducting a Listening Tour as the First Step in RDM Outreach

Elizabeth McCall

While research data management services are growing in academic libraries, researchers’ awareness of these services is often lacking. Forming relationships with researchers can also be a challenge for new personnel. After forming a new library department called Open Scholarship and Research Data, the department conducted an informal “listening tour” with faculty and graduate students to hear more about their data needs. In this talk, I will share how a listening tour can serve as a helpful tool for RDM outreach, especially after changes in personnel or service offerings. I will describe our targeted, smallbatch outreach strategy for the listening tour, which identified highest priority faculty contacts and led to a 40% response rate to our initial communication. I will also share the next steps our department took in crafting our RDM outreach plan, informed by what we heard in the tour, which have helped us to form cross-campus connections with both researchers and fellow research support staff.