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responses), and infrastructure (1 response).
Spencer D. C. Keralis, Shannon Stark, Martin Halbert, and William E. Moen possible roles that librarians may play in research data management into broad categories showed that a strong majority' of respondents believe that they should participate in the following aspects of man- aging data: * informational (directing scholars to resources that will help them manage their own research data) * instructional (providing training in the tools and information nec- essary for curating research data) * infrastructural (providing space and resources for storing and ac- cessing research data) * cooperative (making tools and other resources available for schol- ars' use in managing research data) * collaborative (actively participating in and guiding scholars' re- search data management) * archival (preserving and providing access to research data once a scholar or research project no longer resides at the university) A general concern of respondents, however, was the necessity of top-down institutional support, including financial support and adequate staff, to meet the needs of researchers in any of those roles. The following is a typical response: While probably all of these [roles] are critical in terms of their usefulness to researchers, librarians would not be able to provide these services without substantive institutional support, so I have answered framed by the support for these services. Other respondents cited "woeful budgetary times" to explain their libraries' inability to provide data management support, al- though they acknowledged that such support is critical to the needs of researchers. In terms of policy, respondents overwhelmingly responded in favor of an institution-wide research data management policy, with 78.2 percent of respondents describing such a policy as "very useful" (39.1 percent, 25 respondents) or "critical" (39.1 percent, 25 respon- dents). This finding led us to look closely at the policy landscape at top U.S. research institutions and to examine the ways in which libraries have responded so far to the data management needs of researchers. Agency Guidance Documents Our research began in July of 2011 with an environmental scan of the guidance for retaining and sharing research data at both the funding agency and institutional levels. We conducted focus groups at conferences and professional meetings with stakeholders in the 1 The "strong majority" was nearly unanimous; the only responses of "negligible importance" were in the fields of cooperation (2 responses), collaboration (3
