 So I'd like to welcome everybody today to the webinar. My name's Geri Ryder and I work for the Australian National Data Service and it's my pleasure to be chairing the webinar today. It's my pleasure to introduce our presenters today who are scattered across the country and are joining us from their desktops as I am here in Adelaide. Our first speaker today is Kathy Miller. She's also in Adelaide and she is e-research librarian at the University of Adelaide. Secondly we will have Philippa Broadley who's up in Brisbane. Philippa wears more than one hat at QUT. One of them being a research data librarian hat. And finally we'll have Diantha Gronawagan who's in Melbourne and is director of research infrastructure at Monash University. So three terrific speakers today. So I'll pass over to Kathy to get us underway. Well thank you very much to you Geri and to Anne's for inviting me to speak today. I've been at the University of Adelaide for a little over three years now and I've actually had five different job titles in that time. So by necessity my presentation today is going to be a bit of a timeline of the developments at the university that led to these different roles. But I also wanted to touch on the skills and the experiences that I've developed along the way. So it's going to be very much a personal story and hopefully some of the experiences I've had might have some relevance for other people out there as well. So research data management engagement at the University of Adelaide started in mid-2009 and was championed by Vanessa Barrett our digital services librarian. Now her persistent efforts led to the university libraries leading an Anne's funded project which was called Seeding the Commons and that began in early 2011 which is when the position of research data project officer was advertised. I was at the time working outside of libraries and my most recent library experience at that time was as senior librarian at the Gold Coast Institute of TAFE but in early 2011 I was back in Adelaide and I was in the unlikely position of doing some sales administration for a local brewery. So needless to say I didn't think I was in a very good position to win the role when I saw it advertised but in hindsight it was the skills and the experiences that I acquired outside of libraries which really helped me in applying for that role. The Seeding the Commons project was a new opportunity for the University of Adelaide. We had of course set deliverables and we had a lot of support from the universities around the country who were already involved in Anne's projects but there was also a lot of uncertainty. The methods for achieving the project outcomes and the project plans were not dictated at all. So the project was from the outset very open and as a consequence the role that I applied for required skills in project planning and I had experience in project management from a previous role outside of libraries as I said where I had been responsible for coordinating large groups of stakeholders in revising and developing training packages. So I was able to draw on that experience when I was preparing my application and also during my interview to describe to the interview panel how I thought the project might progress. So on the right of the screen I'm starting to list some of the skills that I think are important in this role and project coordination in my case has been an important skill but also the ability to communicate plans to others is also an important skill that I've helped me to get that position in the first place but also skills that I've continued to develop along the way. Now the bulk of the project work that we did in the first 12 months either took place outside of the libraries or it was work that we hadn't been engaged in in the library before. So in the case of work outside of the libraries a lot of the work was meeting researchers in their offices to conduct research data interviews and the work in the library was using systems and standards that my colleagues hadn't had experience with before, things like research data Australia. In certain cases I really felt I needed to be able to think on my feet and troubleshoot without being able to refer to procedures because there were none and I mentioned planning was a key part of the role but also there was a huge amount of uncertainty that we couldn't plan for. The university libraries hadn't done a project like this evening, the Commons project before so we in many ways didn't know what sort of response we would receive from our research community and that's why I've listed troubleshooting and being able to cope with ambiguity as key skills because thinking on your feet and being able to revise plans very quickly were important skills particularly in the early days of the project. The skills that I developed then put me in a good position for my next role at the university which was as a project officer on the university's metadata store project which was another and funded project to implement an institutional research metadata store here at the university. So in that position I worked not only in the library but also in the university's technology services department and that's really where I hit my next big learning curve. That project was my first real exposure to software development and in addition to picking up some new technical skills I had to become very quickly acquainted with the software development life cycle and begin to speak the language of my new colleagues and my project manager and the team of developers that I was working with. So I spent a significant amount of time in the early stages of that project reading and familiarising myself with project workflows and templates and that experience really gave me a much better understanding of systems and the processes used by my technology services colleagues. I mentioned that and I think it's important because research data management is a field that touches many university departments and it's very closely linked with IT and I think that any development of skills or experiences relating to technology certainly can't hurt working in research data management. So in my story that exposure to IT projects happened to lead to another opportunity in 2013. At that point I returned to the university libraries as research data librarian and I was primarily supporting the roll out of our metadata store called Data Connect but I also had an opportunity to be seconded part time to technology services and I took a short term secondment there as a business analyst on an e-research strategy project. It was a good opportunity because I was able to contribute a lot of my experience and knowledge about research data management at the university into the project but I was also able to learn more broadly about e-research at the university including the current and the potential use of high performance computing and e-research tools and how those relate to research data management. So I didn't know it at the time but in hindsight that exposure definitely played a role in me coming to be in the position I'm in now in 2014. Earlier in the year we wrote a proposal for a university library's e-research support service and that included the role of the e-research librarian. The proposal was accepted and the position went ahead and when it was advertised of course I applied for it and was really happy to be able to get that role and start only last month in the position of e-research librarian. So in this new role I'm really covering a lot of the same ground that I have covered before. I still have responsibility for research data management, engagement and education as well as promoting Data Connect, our metadata store and delivering training around research data management. I provide a lot of one-on-one guidance with individual researchers about planning for research data management as well as working with different groups of researchers on the best way for them to manage their research data management responsibilities. And I find that communication really underpins everything that I do. I think that good research data management is largely a matter of common sense and it's really about being able to communicate it and logically and systematically step through a workflow with people to help break down issues and to help develop strategies and solutions that are going to work in managing data sets. In addition to that work around research data management I also now have a role in planning and developing a broader e-research support service that gives the university libraries a bigger scope to engage with technology services and to support researchers in using e-research tools and other research services within the university but beyond the university as well. At this very early stage of course our plans are still in development but the conversations we've had so far have been very exciting and they're pointing to the library having a much stronger role in brokering solutions and working collaboratively with our colleagues around the university. So the last three years now into the fourth year have been quite a journey and indeed every university's research data management journey is different for every organisation as well. In my case I've been really fortunate to have been involved in the succession of projects at the University of Adelaide. I started in that role as research data project officer in 2011 and I'm still here. Which is lucky for me. A project contract is an excellent way to learn and apply new skills and I think it makes you a much stronger candidate for the next position. So I really recommend any involvement you can have with projects as opportunities for development. They also offer you a chance to look at your organisation from a different perspective and to identify opportunities that you might not see in everyday business and particularly with the ANS funded projects that we conducted here. They were not confined to one area although they were based largely in the university libraries. They had an institutional wide remit so I was able to communicate with a really broad range of colleagues across the university on those projects and build up relationships around the university that have helped me to develop my communication skills but they've also helped the library to gain recognition in this area. I think in many ways now in this role as a research librarian I've gone back to square one as I've started in the initial role because I'm using those exact same planning and communication skills now that I started with to develop this new e-research support service. So I noticed, Jerry, that when this webinar was advertised it was titled Becoming a Data Librarian, Everything You Wanted to Know but in my experience I think it's really impossible to know everything about the job because every day brings something new and as you can see from those five different job titles I've had in such a short time there's a real ongoing evolution and changing around the support model in terms of responding to different researchers needs and new and emerging needs as IT requirements and project funding and different government initiatives influence the sector. So for me I think it would have to be a continual evolution of communication and engagement with researchers that underpins the role of the research data librarian. Thanks so much, Kathy, that's fantastic and a really interesting insight into your journey and the University of Adelaide's journey over the last three years so we'll move straight on now to Philippa from the QUT.