 Good afternoon, my name is Jordan Bass and I'm the coordinator for the Research Services and Digital Strategies Unit here at the University of Manitoba. This presentation provides an overview of lessons learned in developing and deploying a new research service unit at the University of Manitoba Libraries. The University of Manitoba is a research intensive medical and doctoral level university, the only one of its kind in the province of Manitoba, and a member of the U15 group of Canadian Research Universities. The University of Manitoba Libraries comprises 11 libraries distributed over two campuses that support over 100 academic programs. The practice brief itself aims to offer research libraries of comparable size and scope, an overview of our experience developing three research support services over a three-year period. Library support of research in their parent academic institutions should be informed by local contexts and demonstrated need, but should also be highly perceptible and accessible by faculty and students. This presentation will include a brief introduction for context, a description of the three research services we deployed, as well as a discussion on lessons learned and recommendations for the future. When research services and digital strategies, or RSDS, became a unit in 2017, significant organizational changes took place within the University of Manitoba Libraries and within the larger university itself. As new projects and priorities arose through the 2017 to 2019 period, the pace at which RSDS could deliver on its service goals was impacted. Research support initiatives were reprioritized to address new objectives that redeemed more immediate and time-sensitive. Consequently, some RSDS initiatives were suspended or slowed in their development, and the unit has since recalibrated its focus and goals with these shifting priorities. Our key performance indicators are limited in some areas due to the fact that many of these research services are still new and measuring their success at this juncture would be over the speculative. Our final section, Recommendations for the Future, discusses the importance and necessity of quantifiably measuring the impact and performance of our research services. Quantitative data was drawn primarily from the University of Manitoba Libraries' repository systems, while the qualitative data was derived from personal files, team and vendor correspondence, as well as project documents. Our institution has not collected indicator data that would serve as drivers for our research services. One of the future priorities for the unit includes a more coordinated, efficient and purposeful gathering and reporting of the unit's activities and impact. To date, the research data management RDM support has been focused on our instance of dataverse, as well as our M-space institutional repository. In addition to hosting and supporting these two data repositories, the University of Manitoba Libraries offers additional RDM support in the forms of data management planning, data deposit assistance, as well as RDM consultation, which involves librarians working with faculty members and or research teams at various phases of the research project lifecycle. Most of this work occurs leading up to our during research deposit within our data repositories. The implementation and ongoing maintenance of M-space and dataverse occurred sometime before the promotion of these repositories to researchers began in earnest. M-space, which serves as the institutional repository, is populated primarily by electronic theses and dissertations. Until very recently, faculty researchers have deposited their work at a much lower and less frequent rate. Though the open access movement was adopted by the libraries early on through the establishment and then dissolution of an open access fund, uptake of open scholarship at our institution has been slow but steadily increasing. In support of data deposit, UM Dataverse was launched in 2016. It could be said that its launch anticipated the need. With RSDS established a year later, one immediate priority was to promote and provide support to data deposit. In tandem with this support was an institutional gap. For a time, there was no reasonably secure data file share option available to researchers that was not a third-party cloud service. As a stop-gap measure, researchers were using UM Dataverse to meet that need. Consequently, the majority of research data deposited in UM Dataverse was restricted to the research teams responsible for that content. This places UM Dataverse repository uniquely as engaged in the active stages of the research project where data is actively being created and manipulated and less at the preservation archival stage of the research lifecycle where it should theoretically be published openly. This situation is not necessarily a negative one and has been more of an opportunity to better understand how researchers are using Dataverse. For approximately four years, the University of Manitoba Libraries have been working in anticipation of the Canadian Tri-Agency mandating the inclusion of a data management plan as a condition for their funding. The Tri-Agency's data management policy is reasonably imminent and it is likely that DMPs will be introduced as a strongly recommended component. To that end, we have started to see some research groups develop DMPs as part of their overall project planning. Our DMP service is largely based on the successful building and promotion of DMP Assistant, which was created by a Canadian library consortial group called the Portage Network, now integrated into the Canadian New Digital Research Infrastructure Organization. DMP Assistant is an online tool which contains DMP templates that can be used to guide researchers through a series of questions they must answer in order to generate and export a DMP that can be used for their grant purposes. At present, we have created one generic DMP template using this online application. Using the DMP exemplars and discipline specific templates developed by the Portage Group, we are now working on adapting these for our own community. In 2018, the libraries began to address its digitization backlog and commissioned a third-party digitization service. Due to the fragile nature of the materials within these collections, we required that the vendor perform their work onsite within one of our libraries. While the project was ultimately a success and that we processed the collection backlog within one calendar year, there were a number of unforeseen challenges to the project, most notably in the areas of coordinating library staff to assist in the project startup phase, as well as securing adequate and secure space in our library so the work could proceed while at the same time not interrupting the many other faculty and student services offered in that library. Successful completion of this digitization project has helped us move forward with the new digitization initiatives. The added benefit of this project was the camaraderie it created with our colleagues, as the project was, in the truest sense, a very successful team-building exercise. Realizing that it is difficult to quantify the value of a respectful and cooperative inter-institutional project, we never the last feel that this was an unintended but nevertheless most welcome project outcome. The University of Mantable Libraries has worked diligently to modernize how it delivers our digitization requests. In what is best described as digitization on demand, we have typically scanned images and textual documents not only for our faculty and students, but also for clients outside of our institution. Our most regular requests, I might note, are to digitize collections held by the libraries when that content is not already available online through one of our content management systems. Given that the University of Mantable Libraries has some of the best digitization equipment in the province, as well as the employee expertise to support it, we also receive requests to digitize material that is held externally by private individuals and commercial entities. The evolution of a research impact service at the University of Mantable Libraries grew organically through demand from faculties and departments who required calculations of publication output, primarily for accredited program requirements as well as grant funding agency requirements. The demand for bibliometrics and related services grew dramatically within our College of Medicine and some of the research-based basic medical sciences in and around 2013. Emerging demands for research impact services is linked to larger external forces within academia, such as funder requirements and inter-institutional competition, through rankings based on a number of different metrics. These forces have given rise to much faculty perception evaluations, case studies and analysis in the literature on the use and misuse of research metrics and the inequity that its application may cause. As with other services discussed within this brief, the idea that institutional research impact or bibliometric support services would benefit from a team-based or centralized committee governance structure, which is highly desirable. To our knowledge, the Canadian universities that have successfully implemented such an approach in the last few years have done so in part due to their respective senior administration understanding the necessity for a centralized and standardized delivery of research impact services that also acknowledges disciplinary nuance. The expected learnings that emerge from this project were as follows. First, in the area of research data management, we expected to learn that our data repositories require more support than they currently receive. However, while we did anticipate that more people being formally trained on our data repositories only made sense to provide better service, we did not conduct enough upstream training nor reinforced the necessary supports needed to accommodate increases in service demands. A second key takeaway from this project relates to the role librarians play in forming and advising the university community on national and international changes within the research industry that will impact work here at home. For example, when major grant funding agencies implemented new requirements related to open scholarship, libraries were called on to assist in meeting those requirements in terms of resources and education. In addition to hosting and supporting data repositories, online resources, as well as providing educational sessions for researchers, the libraries were and continued to be called upon to present on such matters to senior level researchers and university administration to help inform decision making. This point is well articulated in our work on research impact and bibliometrics. Dispelling the misconception that research metrics may only be applied to the detriment of some academic disciplines while other disciplines prosper is not an easy task. However, we have through our research impact service in addition to presentations on the topic become a strong voice on the topic of research metrics and more importantly their proper use and application within our institution. The immediate next step for the three research services reviewed in this practice brief include a more rigorous collecting and analysis of quantifiable data associated with our research services. While our key performance indicator initiative is still in early development stages, our intent is to use the data we collect to better inform and direct our research services. Counts of data and publication deposits, the tally of items digitized and the number of bibliometric analysis projects completed are undeniably important indicators to review for future planning. That being said, the more qualitative elements such as ongoing and meaningful engagement with research teams, establishing rapport with administrators, as well as day-to-day support and consultation for research services are also factors to be recorded in our future performance analysis. Easier said than done, of course, but we will endeavor to bring this less perceptible element of research support to the forefront in our review of performance indicators. There is much we could do to improve on what we have reported on in this practice brief. For instance, more quantitative data would certainly have been of benefit to our analysis and our reporting. Analyzing research support beyond the RSDS unit would also have added considerable depth to this report as there is much more we could do to have included to make this report a more holistic review of library's research support at our institution overall. Developing and launching new research services for all academic disciplines within our institution has and continues to be rewarding and beneficial for both the libraries and researchers. And yet, it has been a challenge to take a pause and reflect. With that in mind, we feel that the work we have done here for this practice brief could possibly be revisited in the future as part of a more longitudinal study. Thank you.