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Research data is ordinarily complex, irreplaceable, costly, and laborious to generate. They are valuable knowledge assets in an electronic or non-digitized form that research organizations should manage since they are the primary research materials generated by researchers during the research process (Ray, 2014). Accordingly, it is indispensable for research Institutions to effectively capture, describe, manage, and make available the data for discovery, sharing, and reusing. The propensity to manage, preserve, discover, share and reuse research data has become vital in furthering knowledge and science, augmentation of novel solutions to social and economic impediments, and amplifying immense potentials for competitiveness and productivity, and liveability (Tenopir et al., 2020).
Researchers are turning to academic libraries to manage their data owing to paradigm shifts in scientific research that are being propagated by cyberinfrastructures, funder mandates for research data sharing, and the proactive role of libraries in shaping scholarly communication. In this regard, the present study attempts to examine researchers’ perceptions of research data management activities at an academic library in an emerging economy to recommend measures to enhance managing, sharing, and reusing research data. The framing of the research problem is motivated by the need to ascertain the contemporary state of RDM in academic libraries of emerging economies from a user perspective. At the core of this was identifying the presence of the necessary capabilities to support efficient managing, sharing and reusing research data. The research approach undertaken enabled the research problem to be addressed in such a way as to permit comparisons over time.
Research Problem
RDM activities in most academic libraries of emerging economies have been described as lacking, rudimental, and unstructured (Chigwada, Chiparausha, & Kasiroori, 2017). Similarly, very little research was conducted to examine how the academic libraries capture, describe, manage, and make available research data for discovery, sharing, and reusing (Nhendodzashe & Pasipamire, 2017). The literature review also shows that not much attention was paid to key stakeholders such as researchers, librarians, the IT office, the research office, and the legal office. Therefore, this study investigates researchers’ perceptions of RDM activities at an academic library in an emerging economy to recommend interventions to enhance managing, sharing, and reusing research data.
Literature
Librarians and researchers reckon that the preservation and management of research data should be a key role in libraries. Banking on the reputable grounds of institutional repositories, academic libraries are expected to amass multiple data from scientific research activities and processes, select, classify, index, preserve and avail it for discovery, sharing, and reuse. Cox and Pinfield (2014) in a report titled ‘The Last Mile’ advance that university libraries have a duty to employ novel stratagems and assemble capabilities in the form of policies, expertise, technologies, and partnerships to enable efficient managing, sharing and reuse of data.