Are we building the data discovery infrastructure researchers want? Comparing perspectives of support specialists and researchers

Abstract:  Data discovery practices currently tend to be studied from the perspective of researchers or the perspective of support specialists. This separation is problematic, as it becomes easy for support specialists to build infrastructures and services based on perceptions of researchers' practices, rather than the practices themselves. This paper brings together and analyze both perspectives to support the building of effective infrastructures and services for data discovery. This is a meta-synthesis of work the authors have conducted over the last six years investigating the data discovery practices of researchers and support specialists, like data librarians. We bring together data collected from in-depth interview studies with 6 support specialists in the field of social science in Germany, with 21 social scientists in Singapore, an interview with 10 researchers and 3 support specialists from multiple disciplines, a global survey with 1630 researchers and 47 support specialists from multiple disciplines, an observational study with 12 researchers from the field of social science and a use case analysis of 25 support specialists from multiple disciplines. We found that while there are many similarities in what researchers and support specialists want and think about data discovery, there are some differences we have identified, most notably the interconnection of data discovery with web search, literature search and social networks. We conclude by proposing recommendations for how different types of support work can address these points of difference to better support researchers' data discovery practices.