The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at The University of Washington is a large academic research institution where many different people contribute to large-scale research projects on a global scale. As librarians responsible for data acquisitions for an Institute – not just individual users - we face a range of barriers to accessing data, even datasets with clear paths to acquisition. These barriers can persist on either side of the acquisition process at such an institution.
This poster will present some ‘pain points’ that are common to the data acquisitions experience at IHME, as well as proposals for improving data access by institutional users. We hope these proposals can help both data providers and institutional data users to help make the process easier on both sides.