What is a Data Help Desk?

A Data Help Desk is a service designed to support researchers by connecting them with data professionals who offer expert guidance on data-related challenges. Its primary goal is to improve research productivity, enhance data quality, and ensure the long-term usability and accessibility of datasets through tailored support and best practices.

By engaging with domain experts, researchers gain valuable knowledge and skills in data management, open science principles, and the FAIR framework—ensuring their data and software are Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable.

The Data Help Desk plays a vital role in

  • Empowering researchers to effectively manage and share their data.
  • Promoting standardized, reproducible workflows and tools.
  • Fostering open science through education and resource sharing.

The Data Help Desk connects domain scientists with data experts to exchange knowledge, tools, and best practices. This model has been successfully implemented at major scientific conferences such as:

  • American Geophysical Union (AGU)
  • European Geophysical Union (EGU)
  • American Meteorological Society (AMS)
  • Geological Society of America (GSA)

How Does It Work?

Typically located in the exhibit halls, the Data Help Desk is staffed by volunteer professionals with data and research expertise who offer real-time support and educational materials for a wide array of data related topics. Along with one-on-one interactions at the data help desk, additional contributions include:

  • Live demos
  • Informational one-pagers
  • Giving locations of resources

A core organizing committee is needed to plan and recruit volunteers to staff the data help desk. The committee reserves space for a table at a conference or other event for the data help desk, and optionally space for presentations and town-hall discussions. In addition to space and personnel, there are needs for resources to help volunteers answer questions and resources to refer users to.

Detailed steps can be found in the Step-by-Step Section.

Key Objectives to Host a Data Help Desk

  1. Address Community Needs
    • The help desk highlights the specific areas where the community needs support, such as acquiring, cleaning, archiving, and citing data, understanding FAIR principles, and working with reproducible workflows. It acts as a low-barrier entry point for researchers seeking to improve their data management practices.
  2. Disseminate Knowledge and Resources
    • It provides a venue to disseminate valuable resources, tools, and workflows to a wide audience. This can include demonstrating tools, sharing information on data repositories, or explaining concepts like data management plans.
  3. Gather Insights for Service Improvement
    • Observing and assessing the questions asked provides valuable insights into users’ needs and informs future data products, tools, services, and training. This understanding can improve existing services and help anticipate user needs for the usability design of other data products and tools. Transaction analysis also offers feedback on how to improve the question and answering process itself.
  4. Inform Staffing Models
    • The data collected from interactions can help inform a staffing model for future information services for science data, potentially including year-round services like chat or email assistance.
  5. Increase Visibility and Promote Initiatives
    • Hosting the help desk, especially at a prominent location like an exhibit hall, increases the visibility of the organizing entities and their commitment to open science and FAIR data. It allows them to promote their programs and resources.
  6. Support and Engage Volunteers
    • A data help desk provides a venue for experts to share their knowledge and resources. The help desk provides a structured way for experts to contribute to the community through presentations and interacting with users.

Key Needs to Host a Data Help Desk

  1. A dedicated core organizing team
    • A group responsible for planning, coordinating, and executing all aspects of the Data Help Desk.
  2. Domain experts
    • Volunteers with specialized knowledge in relevant scientific fields who can provide credible and targeted support to researchers.
  3. Diverse volunteers
    • Contributors from a range of organizational and disciplinary backgrounds who bring varied expertise to the help desk.
  4. A strong advertising strategy
    • A plan to promote the help desk through web content, social media, and conference presentations. This includes having a clearly marked and visible location at the venue.
  5. Available resources
    • A collection of materials such as handouts, flyers, slide decks, and asynchronous content like recorded demos and tutorials.
  6. Demonstration of tools and platforms
    • Live or recorded sessions that showcase relevant tools and workflows researchers can use to improve data management and research outcomes.
  7. Support for data-related questions
    • Guidance for researchers on a wide range of data issues, including finding, sharing, analyzing, publishing, citing, and archiving data and software.
  8. Education on FAIR principles
    • Information and support to help researchers understand and implement FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) data principles in their work.
  9. Promotion of open science practices
    • Encouragement and resources to help researchers meet expectations for open data and software, often in collaboration with Open Science Pavilions at conferences.
  10. Guidance on data management
    • Support with creating data management plans, choosing repositories, managing metadata, and citing data appropriately.
  11. Opportunities for expert connection
    • A venue for researchers to engage directly with data professionals for tailored advice and collaboration.
  12. Response to community needs
    • An approach that identifies and addresses the most pressing data challenges in the research community, such as cleaning, archiving, and citing data.
  13. Support for all knowledge levels
    • Resources and assistance that accommodate researchers with varying levels of experience in data management, from novices to seasoned professionals.

Volunteers are the backbone of a Data Help Desk

Volunteers staff a data help desk and this includes students, early-career, and established researchers. General staff volunteers help with one-on-one interactions at the data help desk covering a range of topics. There are also domain experts, referred to as expert volunteers, who possess specific experience in data and various scientific domains. They are often familiar with the specific scientific domain of the researcher they are assisting. In addition to providing answers and guidance, domain experts at the help desk are encouraged to share their science expertise to find common ground with researchers and build trust. They may participate in backchannel communication channels, such as Slack, to collaborate with other experts and crowdsource answers or refer users. They may also contribute content like specific answers, resource locations, or demos. These resources help researchers—especially students and early-career scientists—understand and adopt practices that make their data more FAIR and their research more impactful.

Expertise provided by volunteers

Volunteers provide expertise that covers a wide range of data-related topics relevant to researchers, including:

  • Finding data.
  • Sharing data.
  • Analyzing data.
  • Publishing data.
  • Citing data and software.
  • Understanding and applying FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable).
  • Creating Data Management Plans (DMPs).
  • Dealing with metadata.
  • Working with data repositories.
  • Handling large datasets or model data.
  • Addressing questions about software.