Last week was the eighth and final week of the online class portion of the Biomedical and Health RDM for Librarians course. I’ve been attempting to reflect on my progress through this course over the last few weeks (with varying levels of success), but now it’s time for my final review.

I initially applied for this program because I wanted a chance to explore an interest that had fallen to the wayside in my professional life. And that has certainly been the case over the last few weeks; this course provided a comprehensive, hands-on curriculum about RDM that I feel has raised me from the level of beginner to expert (or almost expert).

Once accepted into this program, my goal was to take what I learned and use it to create an RDM service on my campus, something that we currently lack. This is something I am extremely excited about, because now I am equipped to lead the effort to establish these services on campus; I feel much more confident with the idea of offering recommendations on RDM best practices to researchers. And in fact, the course gave me the push I needed to actually take steps towards making this idea a reality.

That push was the Capstone Project, something I am still in the early stages of enacting. The crux of the project is a needs assessment of RDM on my campus that will inform the type of RDM service I will ultimately provide. It’s important to me that I have some sort of input from the researchers on campus about this service, so I don’t spend time and energy on a project that will ultimately sit idle. My goal is to have a pilot service in place by August of this year, and I can’t wait to see what that will look like.

Overall, this course tied together all the things I love most about being a librarian: learning, research, creativity, outreach. I have expanded my skill set and increased the value of the information services I can provide to my institution.  And I am so looking forward to capping off this entire experience with meeting my cohort in person in Bethesda in April!

Image Credit – Stuck in Customs/Flickr/CC BY-NC-SA 2.0