Over the past five years, Baker Library at the Harvard Business School has developed a more formal program to facilitate the use of data throughout the lifecycle of business research. Driven by user needs and institutional data retention requirements, the Research Data Program (RDP) has established and brought together services in the realms of data acquisition and discovery, data curation and management, advice on research methods, and data sharing and archiving. These efforts are in line with a field-wide trend of librarian-led efforts to manage, share, and preserve institutional research data. One initiative of Baker's RDP, the Research Datasets Tool, is a searchable, secure discovery platform designed to enable the institution to log and find datasets purchased by individual faculty. Rollout of the Research Datasets Tool illustrates the benefits and challenges common to efforts to track institutional assets: increased ease of access and maximization of University resources are tempered by the burden of user education and the difficulty of integrating various information discovery systems. Over the next several years, Baker will continue to develop its existing research data tools and services, explore new areas of service, and work to better integrate its services with the larger university community.
With the ubiquitous digital ecosystem providing information to faculty and students in real time via a myriad of channels, does an academic research library continue to provide real value to faculty's research and teaching as well as students' learning? Or, has the academic research library become irrelevant to twenty-first century scholarship? Describing a variation on information literacy and research skills development approaches, this chapter makes a case for embedding good information practice into a library's products and self-service tools rather than investing in standalone instruction. Close alignment with institutional priorities, the application of user-centric product and service design principles, and a commitment to innovation in information management practices and platforms are cornerstones of this strategy in a graduate business school library. Loosely based on Harvard Business School's case method, this chapter details two frameworks used by HBS's Baker Library, and provides examples of information products created to enable student learning.
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