The Fondren Fellows program funds Rice undergraduate or graduate student research projects that benefit the Fondren Library and the scholarly community. Several Fondren Fellows projects have worked on DSS-related projects:

JANE EVANS, HARVEY MEMORIES PROJECT (2018)
Graduate Student in Art History
Mentors: Lisa Spiro and Dara Flinn

JENNIFER LEE, DEVELOPING A MARKETING PLAN FOR LIBRARY PUBLISHING SERVICES (2018)
Undergraduate Student in Psychology
Mentor: Shannon Kipphut-Smith

This project focused on the creation of an effective marketing plan for the Digital Scholarship Service (DSS) to reach out to the Rice community in order to promote the services and resources. To understand how the Rice community wants to learn about Fondren’s resources and how frequently the Rice community utilizes the Fondren resources, Jennifer developed and distributed a survey to the Rice community. Jennifer recommends that Fondren library communicate with the Rice community through email notifications and newsletters to better reach a larger audience. To promote DSS, Fondren should engage in events with faculty and graduate students to help them utilize and take advantage of the resources that will benefit their work and the university’s scholarship repository.

Jennifer’s full report can be found here.

ESLAM EL-SHAHAT, DEVELOPING A PLAN FOR RESEARCH DATA MANAGEMENT GRADUATE TRAINING (2017)
Graduate Student in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Mentor: Lisa Spiro

IAN LOWRIE, DEVELOPING A CULTURE OF CARE FOR RESEARCH DATA AT RICE (2016)
Graduate Student in Anthropology
Mentor: Lisa Spiro

Data management has become a more pressing issue for researchers lately, as funding agencies are increasingly requiring researchers to present rationalized data management plans and to ensure access to their research data well after the completion of their funded research. However, institutional support for research data management is still a relatively new field, without established best practices. This project uses interviews with Rice faculty and data librarians at peer institutions to develop insight into the research data management environment at Rice, and develop comprehensive recommendations for how Fondren might best support ongoing efforts to develop policies and infrastructure to support research data management by both faculty and student researchers. It suggests that the existing Rice Digital Scholarship Archive could be profitably used to facilitate sharing and archiving of research data, and identifies a number of key areas where Fondren might assist departments in educating researchers about the importance and technical aspects of rationalized research data management.

Ian’s report can be found here.

MARCEL LAFLAMME, AUTHOR RIGHTS (2016)
Graduate Student in Anthropology
Mentor: Shannon Kipphut-Smith

This project aims to understand more about how tenure-stream faculty at Rice think about and act on their author rights in connection with their published work. Many faculty want to make their scholarly and professional output more accessible, whether by uploading it to Rice’s institutional depository or by posting it to an academic social network. However, faculty members may not always have a clear understanding of how and where they are permitted to share their work under the terms of the author agreements they have signed. This project uses interviews and document analysis to piece together the values, beliefs, and actually existing practices of faculty members, using participants’ most recent publication as a case study. The results will be used to improve the resources and services that Fondren offers to faculty, and they also stand to fill a gap in the scholarly communication research literature.

Marcel’s recommendations can be found here.