Building the New England Collaborative Data Management Curriculum

The need for a curriculum designed for librarians to use for teaching STEM research data management skills to their constituents from diverse STEM disciplines has been widely identified. (Qin and D’Ignazio 2010). From 2012-2014, a collaborative group of New England librarians, led by a project team from the University of Massachusetts Medical School, developed lecture notes, presentation slides, assignments, readings, and case studies for teaching research data management. The New England Collaborative Data Management Curriculum (NECDMC) is unique in its flexibility; providing subject agnostic instructional materials in a modular format for teaching common data management best practices along with a suite of teaching cases illustrating data management in disciplinary contexts. This article is a follow-up to the “Teaching Research Data Management: An Undergraduate/Graduate Curriculum (Piorun et al. 2012) that was published in the Journal of eScience Librarianship.