Long-term monitoring and research projects are essential to understand ecological change and the effectiveness of management activities. An inherent characteristic of long-term projects is the need for consistent data collection over time, requiring rigorous attention to data management and quality assurance. Recent papers have provided broad recommendations for data management; however, practitioners need more detailed guidance and examples. We present general yet detailed guidance for the development of comprehensive, concise, and effective data management for monitoring projects. The guidance is presented as a graded approach, matching the scale of data management to the needs of the organization and the complexity of the project. We address the following topics: roles and responsibilities; consistent and precise data collection; calibration of field crews and instrumentation; management of tabular, photographic, video, and sound data; data completeness and quality; development of metadata; archiving data; and evaluation of existing data from other sources. This guidance will help practitioners execute effective data management, thereby, improving the quality and usability of data for meeting project objectives as well as broader meta-analysis and macrosystem ecology research.

As liaison librarian to several departments at UNLV, she teaches information literacy for many students, provides reference assistance to the campus and community, and maintains the collection in assigned subject areas. Her research interests include information literacy instruction and assessment, the notion of threshold concepts, the effect a student's emotional state has on their learning, and improving access to technical literature.

While many academic libraries have followed the public library lead in developing makerspaces, not all libraries have the money or space to dedicate to such large-scale operations. This case study explores a different approach to engaging users with new technology and investigates how to support their creativity without a costly investment in space and staffing. It demonstrates not only how students can be provided a virtual space to explore technology equipment, but also how their opinions can be leveraged for growing the collection and creating training materials.

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