“The story of data”. A socio-technical approach to education for the data librarian role in the CityLIS library school at City, University of London
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/LM-01-2017-0009 |
| Published date | 15 August 2017 |
| Date | 15 August 2017 |
| Pages | 312-322 |
| Author | Lyn Robinson,David Bawden |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Librarianship/library management,HR in libraries,Library strategy,Library promotion |
“The story of data”
A socio-technical approach to education for
the data librarian role in the CityLIS library
school at City, University of London
Lyn Robinson and David Bawden
City, University of London, London, UK
Abstract
Purpose –The purpose of this paper is to describe a new approach to education for library/information
students in data literacy –the principles and practice of data collection, manipulation and management –as a
part of the Masters programmes in library and information science (CityLIS) at City, University of London.
Design/methodology/approach –The course takes a socio-technical approach, integrating, and giving equal
importanceto, technicaland social/ethicalaspects. Topicscovered include:the relationbetween data, information
and documents; representation of digital data; network technologies; information architecture; metadata; data
structuring; search engines, databases and specialised retrieval tools; text and data mining, web scraping;
data cleaning, manipulation, analysisand visualisation;coding; data metricsand analytics; artificial intelligence;
data management and data curation; data literacy and data ethics; and constructing data narratives.
Findings –The course, which was well received by students in its first iteration, gives a basic grounding in
data literacy, to be extended by further study, professional practice and lifelong learning.
Originality/value –This is one of the first accounts of an introductory course to equip all new entrants to
the library/information professions with the understanding and skills to take on roles in data librarianship
and data management.
Keywords Ethics, Data analysis, Education, Data literacy, Data librarianship, Socio-technical
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
A role for librarians, and other information professionals, which is of considerable and
increasing importance is the handling of data resources, on behalf of their users, and for
their own purposes. This role, or perhaps it is better to say spectrum of roles, parallels that
in the more traditional world of text and image resources. In supporting users, this ranges
from a concern with the overall institutional, or even wider, policies for the management and
curation of data sets of all kinds, to assisting an individual user with the detail of small-scale
data handling and analysis. It also includes the collection, analysis, management and use of
data relating to library operations, and their use as metrics for service evaluation and
improvement; an extension of the well-established “library statistics”. The recent great
expansion of the amount of available data, (research, government, civic, organisational,
personal), and of public and institutional awareness of its importance, lends an urgency to
the need for library/information specialists to be fully aware of the new “data dimension”
to their work, and this certainly amounts to a new role for librarians, in line with the theme
of this special issue. As Ekstrøm et al. (2016) write “Imagine a librarian armed with the
digital tools to automate literature reviews for any discipline, by reducing thousands of
articles’ideas into memes and then applying network analysis to visualise trends in
emerging lines of research. What if your research librarian could then dig deeper and use
[a digital tool] to map in which sections of articles your key research terms appear? Imagine
the results confirmed that your favourite research term almost never appears in the results
sections, but clusters only around introductions and perspectives? And what if the librarian
did not stop there, but zoomed into the cloud of data with savvy statistics, applying the
latest text and data mining techniques to satisfy even the most scrutinising scientific mind,
before formulating an innovative research question?”
Library Management
Vol. 38 No. 6/7, 2017
pp. 312-322
© Emerald PublishingLimited
0143-5124
DOI 10.1108/LM-01-2017-0009
Received 20 January 2017
Revised 23 April 2017
Accepted 25 April 2017
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/0143-5124.htm
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