In 2025, RDAP proudly hosted its fifth online annual conference on the theme Evolutions in Data Services: Forging Resiliency from March 11 to 13. With higher education facing rapid changes due to federal influences, data librarians moved quickly to support each other and researchers at their institutions. We are pleased to share another special edition of Journal of eScience Librarianship (JeSLIB) featuring works by presenters from the 2025 RDAP Summit. This issue includes 12 full articles detailing current practices, challenges, and innovations by members of our community at various universities across the United States. Conference materials, including slides and abstracts, are available on Open Science Framework (OSF) in the 2025 RDAP Summit Archive.
In one full-length paper, Alissa Link Cilfone and Jen Ferguson of Northeastern University investigated an often-overlooked research population in academic libraries: staff researchers. In “Investigating and Addressing the Needs of Research Support Staff,” the authors describe how their library shifted its outreach beyond faculty and students to include postdocs, research scientists, lab managers, technicians, and study coordinators who play critical roles in day-to-day research activity. The article shares both the findings and the concrete steps the library is taking in response, offering a practical model for other institutions seeking to better understand and support research staff as integral stakeholders in the research ecosystem.
In “Building a lightweight dataset catalog in Digital Commons,” authors Claire Warner, Amy Reese, and Marla Hertz detail how data librarians at the University of Alabama Birmingham Libraries developed a data catalog for their institutional repository. This article also contains instructions on how to adapt the authors’ processes for other institutions who may wish to create a similar data catalog.
“Resilient by Design: Assessment Strategies for Data Services from RDAP 2025” is a commentary by Rose Fredrick of Creighton University that pulls together the common themes among several presentations. Fredrick reflects on assessment-related presentations at the 2025 conference and the importance of assessment as not just routine but an important task that should be part of data services work to help shape and guide the direction of your programs.
“Identifying restricted data repositories supporting mediated access via data usage agreements” provides a resource for a common problem in data librarianship. Researchers need recommendations for public data repositories that can also provide mediated access for restricted datasets. Mary K. Oberlies and Megan Potterbusch collaborated on this project and shared a spreadsheet of 16 US-based data repositories which accept sensitive data in the social sciences and offer mediated access.
As an early career data services professional, Samantha Harmon reflects on the importance of professional development in “Forging Resilience and Building Capacity: Professional Development in Early-Career Research Data Services.” In this commentary, the author describes their experience with presenting at RDAP, participating in the Data Services Continuing Professional Education (DSCPE) program, and participating in the ACRL’s Exploring AI with Critical Information Literacy course, and how it directly influenced the services they were able to create for the institution. Overall, professional development is essential in an evolving field where many professionals need to build their services from the ground up.
Bryan M. Gee of The University of Texas at Austin examines institutional data discovery in “The hunt for research data: Development of an open-source workflow for tracking institutionally-affiliated research data publications.” The article presents an open-source, API-based workflow that combines broad and targeted searches to overcome inconsistent or missing affiliation metadata, identifying more than 4,300 institutionally affiliated datasets across over 70 platforms and recognizing institutional discovery as a critical data reuse case.
In another full-length paper, Joreen Arigye, Wei Zakharov, Carla B. Zoltowski, Sarah Sewell, and Senay Purzer explore graduate mentor perspectives in “Investigating Graduate Mentor Perspectives on Data Information Literacy and Stewardship in Undergraduate Engineering Research Projects.” Using a case-based approach, the study highlights the critical role graduate mentors play in shaping students’ data competencies, revealing that while students are well supported in technical tasks, gaps persist in documentation, metadata, ethics, and long-term data preservation.
Nathaniel D. Porter and Sebastian Karcher discuss the creation of an open curriculum for qualitative research to help qualitative researchers work towards reaching open science goals in the eScience in Action article “Building Open Qualitative Science with Open Curriculum.” The organizers have piloted the curriculum at various conferences, where it was received well, and hope the content will become a regular offering through the Library Carpentries.
In the full-length paper “Strengthening Data Management Systems: Insights from the Machine Actionable Plans (MAP) Project’s Institutional Pilots,” authors Matthew Murray, Briana Wham, Matthew Harp, Matthew B. Carson, and Sara Gonzales describe four case studies occurring at four different institutions centered around machine actionable DMSPs (maDMSPs). The four case studies include using generative AI to create a prototype of a data management plan feedback system, hosting a two-day workshop to raise awareness of maDMSPs, developing workflows to automate tracking, and creating an RDM and DMSP workflow for the entire institution. The case studies discuss successes, barriers, room for growth, and next steps, with a common overall theme centered around the importance of growing ties across campus.
Due to advancements in technology and demand for storage, Deb McCaffrey, Erin D. Foster, Lev Gorenstein, Tobin Magle, and Venice Bayrd share new ways to think about long-term data storage in the article “Evolving the 3-2-1 backup rule for more resilient data.” In addition to sharing the reasons behind hosting their conference workshop, the authors discuss strategies to avoid data loss.
Data librarians often collaborate with other partner units on university campuses, and effective collaboration requires boundary spanning between the discipline of data librarianship and those of partner units. Venice Bayrd, Erin D. Foster, Lev Gorenstein, Tobin Magle, and Deb McCaffrey explore the boundary spanning nature of data librarianship in their article “Send It Away, or Put It On Display? How librarians and research computing staff can collaborate across language barriers” and highlight key differences in how data librarians and other research support units understand key terminology.
Understanding what researchers value in a data repository is an important question and can guide outreach for an institutional repository. Cara Key, Diana E. Park, Jane Nichols, Clara Llebot, and L.K. Borland surveyed researchers who used either their institutional repository or a selected set of outside data repositories to see which factors influenced their choice in their article “The Repository of Last Resort? Exploring the Role of Institutional Repositories in the Data Repository Ecosystem through Researcher Perspectives.” They determined that researchers trust and value the library’s services, and that there is value in maintaining an IR for data deposits. The authors also include three personas they created to help target their future outreach efforts.
We look forward to exploring the theme Practical, Personalized, Impactful: Research Data in the Real World with the RDAP community at the next Summit, which will be held virtually from April 13 through 16, 2026.