Hello Folks,
Hope you are all enjoying the start of our internships. My name is Megan Mach and I’m the intern working on “DataONE Messaging: Creating Marketing for DataONE Stakeholder Communities.” I have never done semi-live journaling, but I’m going to give it a stab in this weekly notebook.
This first week I had my meeting with Amber Budden down at NCEAS in Santa Barbara. We talked over the intricacies of DataONE and its four primary stakeholders, in other words, its audience.
- Repositories
- Librarians/Data usage centers
- Funders
- End users/Researchers
One of the main products that will come out of my two month internship will be materials that are targeted at each of these stakeholders, as opposed to creating a one size fits all set of language and graphics. For example, the language used to gain the interest of Repositories is likely to be much more technical and usage related–data availability, metadata transfer, increased exposure, while a Researcher downloading data will be more interested in data discovery–searching multiple repositories at once, efficient data management.
In addition to language and outreach materials I will be working on graphics that make DataONE more streamlined when to communicating what it is DataONE does for researchers and repositories.
For me, the most challenging aspect of my internship will be the reframing of language to better target various stakeholders. I am planning to put together a small survey that includes various descriptions of DataONE, from technical to oversimplified, and ask my peers* their opinions on clarity and understanding across these different descriptions.
*For reference, in my case “peers” are the IT Librarians at my local postgraduate institutions (Librarian stakeholder) and graduate students, postdocs and professors (Researcher stakeholder). I know this only gets me half of our audience, but it seems like a good way to get started and provide clear evidence that I can bring back to DataONE on what most clearly conveys the value of DataONE (at least something that will have people going to the website to learn more).
I finished out the week by learning more about DataONE, creating graphics, talking with stakeholders, and starting to work through a storyline for communicating why we all need DataONE in our lives.
Hope you all had a good one.
Megan