Improving the Quality of Digital Preservation Using Metrics

Academic librarians and data specialists use a variety of approaches to gain insight into how researcher data needs and practices vary by discipline, including surveys, focus groups, and interviews. Some published studies included small numbers of business school faculty and graduate students in their samples, but provided little, if any, insight into variations within the business discipline. Business researchers employ a variety of research designs and data collection methods and engage in quantitative and qualitative data analysis. The purpose of this paper is to provide deeper insight into primary and secondary data use by business graduate students at one Canadian university based on a content analysis of a corpus of 32 Master of Science in Management theses. This paper explores variations in research designs and data collection methods between and within business subfields (e.g., accounting, finance, operations and information systems, marketing, or organization studies) in order to better understand the extent to which these researchers collect and analyze primary data or secondary data sources, including commercial or open data sources. The results of this analysis will inform the work of data specialists and liaison librarians who provide research data management services for business school researchers.. keywords: business, primary data, secondary data, graduate students, research data management Introduction A bridge is an apt metaphor for the work of an academic liaison librarian, who acts as a boundary spanner between faculty, students, and the Library. Much of this boundary spanning activity is driven by traditional liaison responsibilities including reference service, information literacy instruction, and collection development. As Canadian academic libraries begin to develop new research data management (RDM) services, liaison librarians have been identified as ‘crucial intermediaries between the library’s services and its researcher community... [who] often have domain-specific expertise and a network of department-specific relationships’ (Steeleworthy, 2014, p.7). Like many of its Canadian peers, Brock University Library has articulated a desire, through its most recent strategic planning exercise, to explore opportunities to support research data management and curation (Brock University Library, 2012). As the liaison librarian to the Goodman School of Business at Brock University, I was quite familiar with the challenges of working with complex, and often expensive, commercial sources of numeric business data such as Compustat and CRSP (Hong & Lowry, 2007), but less familiar with the data practices of business scholars who generated primary data as part of the research life cycle. In order to bridge the business data divide, I needed to acquire evidence-based Bridging the Business Data Divide: Insights into Primary and Secondary Data Use by Business Researchers