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Sara Gonzales Receives Data Management Course Travel Award

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Sara Gonzales, Data Librarian at Galter Health Sciences Library & Learning Center, was recently awarded a travel stipend to attend the Data Management for Librarians CE Course at the University of Minnesota Health Sciences Libraries in Minneapolis, MN in August 2018. The objective of the course is to introduce librarians to research data management and allow them to develop practical strategies for incorporating data into their existing roles. It will expose participants to key elements of research data management in the health sciences, including best practices for documentation, metadata, backup, storage, and preservation. Participants in the CE course may also participate in an online data management skills community of practice (CoP). The CoP will meet quarterly to take a deeper dive into a data management topic that could include federal funding compliance, data preservation & sharing, and open science.

The Feinberg School of Medicine (FSM) has championed the transformation of Galter Library into a “next generation” information hub where library and informatics services keep pace – and help to advance – leading-edge patient care, research, and education. With the recent funding of the CTSA Data to Health Coordinating Center (CD2H) and all grant efforts being focused in Galter Library, we are expanding our efforts in data management, open science, reproducibility, and promotion of best practices.

Matt Carson, Head of the Digital Systems Department, is leading a data indexing software project funded by the CD2H that will serve the Feinberg School of Medicine and the larger Clinical and Translational Sciences Award (CTSA) community.

“This project will rely heavily on Sara’s involvement with research data and metadata management education for researchers across a variety of domains, as well as creation of associated training materials," Matt said. "For the data index, Sara will also perform requirements analysis, get feedback from users, and help us plan our metadata schema by studying the different data sets generated by users. Sara will make the most of the Data Management for Librarians CE Course, leveraging the supportive environment on our campus, as she applies the lessons learned from the training and from the Data Management Skills Community of Practice. The knowledge she will acquire and the relationships she will build will help us accomplish our goal to improve data quality, discoverability, and reuse in the translational sciences.”

Sara has extensive experience working with various types of data in libraries, museums, planetariums, and historical societies, and she will benefit greatly from training and networking in the health sciences domain through her participation in the workshop and the data management skills community of practice. We’re thrilled that she’s been given this travel award and look forward to her future contributions to the Galter Library’s mission to expand and enhance data support for the Northwestern medicine community.

This activity is supported by the National Library of Medicine (NLM), National Institutes of Health (NIH) under cooperative agreement number 1UG4LM012346.

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Updated: March 5, 2020