The Right Tools are Everything – Researchers Toolkit

The Libraries are excited to share the recent release of the Researcher Toolkit (https://researchertoolkit.wisc.edu/) after months of collaboration between the UW-Madison Libraries and Research Data Services, DoIT Research Cyberinfrastructure, the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, and the Data Science Hub. 

Designed to advance emerging research, this toolkit assists UW-Madison faculty, staff, and student researchers navigate the local research resources available with each phase of their research project, from planning to publishing and close-out. 

Navigating the resources available at an institution as large as UW can be difficult. In putting together the Researcher Toolkit, I learned about resources I wish I’d found when I was a grad student.,” says Sarah Stevens, Data Science Institute, Data Science Hub, WID. “We hope that the Researcher Toolkit can be a great first place to find support for all researchers on campus as well as an important catalog of resources for research support staff like me.”

By aggregating and organizing local campus research support resources, the Researcher Toolkit, formerly known as the Research Project Resource Guide (RPRG), researchers can more easily discover and access the help they need. 

“Everyone involved in this project brought their unique expertise, campus knowledge, and network of resources to the table,” says Cook. “This was critical to helping us think about research needs and resources holistically and create a toolkit that we hope will be really useful to campus researchers.”

Using the research data lifecycle as its foundation, the toolkit allows users to navigate the stages of the lifecycle to find highlighted resources particularly relevant to each stage and customized lists of all available and useful resources. The research lifecycle includes planning, collecting & storing data, analyzing & visualizing data, publishing research artifacts, and closing out the findings.

As more people use the toolkit, the teams who partnered on it continue to add relevant resources to ensure it is as inclusive as possible to all disciplines. They welcome suggestions of new resources and look forward to supporting the researchers’ impactful work across campus.