Data Stewardship Studies: Skills-orientated Job Profile for Librarians

Data stewards are key players in academia implementing Open Science principles and supporting sustainable research data management. They collaborate with stakeholders to establish, govern and maintain processes to collect research data, make it usable for research objectives and facilitate its transformation into research outputs. Moreover, they assist in quality assurance and support informed decision making on its openness for reuse according to ethical, legal and social expectations. In this talk, we debate the importance of data stewards and why libraries should play a central role in their training and future employment. We exemplify this by discussing the curriculum developed in the Skills4EOSC project (https://skills4eosc.eu).

It promotes data stewardship as a core skill, equipping libraries with the tools to lead in Open Science practices. The curriculum builds on existing materials such as those from Essentials 4 Data Support by RDNL (Research Data Netherlands). We generously apply the FAIR principles to the didactic conception resulting in an open and accessible learning offering. Individual institutions can easily adapt it to create a skills-orientated training programme according to their discipline-specific context. ... mehrThe curriculum consists of sections such as:

- Research Data Management (incl. Data Management Plans, FAIR, etc.)
- Research Software Management (e.g. Research Software Support by Netherlands eScience Center)
- Policy and Governance
- Ethics

Each section is broken down into modules with learning objectives, key messages, suggested resources and instructor notes.

BiblioCon 2025 presents us with the opportunity to discuss library-specific aspects of the curriculum in this transdisciplinary field, why libraries are well placed to lead the way in training and integrating data stewards within scientific institutions, and the new challenges facing data stewardship (e.g. AI).