Data World Does Not Lack Standards

When I first read the Call for Papers for this special issue, I was dismayed to find this line within it: “However, the world of data lacks the ingrained standards and practices the library and academic community have built up over the years.” It is true that there are many standards and practices for data depending on the discipline in which the research is done. Because data themselves are more varied in their format than publications such as books and journal articles, standards for data are necessarily more varied and complex than those describing print publications. Whereas social science survey data must discuss sampling techniques and any weighting procedures and provide questionnaires, astronomy data has quite different concerns: frequency bands, equipment specifications and calibration, and spectra measurements. Consequently the standards involved may feel less “ingrained” to those who are not deeply involved in the research of different disciplines. And, too, librarians may be less familiar with standards that apply in parts of the research lifecycle in which they have tended to be less involved. Every library student knows MARC, but that is a standard used primarily in the dissemination stage of research, not in the data collection stage. Standards in data may also be more in flux than those for publications, particularly recently, given the rapid evolution of mandates for data sharing and their effect on disciplines that have no existing tradition of open access

Pioneers in the Wild West: Managing Data Collections

During the last few years, many academic libraries have accepted the challenge of helping their users locate and acquire the numeric data they need. To meet their users’ ever-increasing need for data, librarians are purchasing data sets one at a time (“small data”). This service, though important to our users, raises many issues in the areas of collection scope, acquisition procedures, and discovery and access. The authors conducted a survey of data librarians in summer 2015 and followed up by interviewing five data librarians in depth to report on how academic libraries collect and manage small data and to explore the strengths and weaknesses of various approaches

Data Librarianship: A Day in the Life - Science Edition

The authors conducted a survey of and interviews with data librarians in the sciences about their education, continuing education, services and tools. The book chapter presents a summary of both. This dataset represents only the de-identified survey responses, and is in Excel format

Appendices for book chapter, An Approach to Supporting Teaching with Data in the Social Sciences

Three methodological appendices for the chapter titled, An Approach to Supporting Teaching with Data in the Social Sciences within the book titled, Academic Libraries as Partners in Data Science Ecosystems, eds., N. Mani & M. Cawley. Included are Appendix 1, the semi-structured interview guide; Appendix 2, the email invitation to participate with which we recruited individual faculty; and Appendix 3, the consent to participate form

An Approach to Supporting Teaching With Data in the Social Sciences

Book chapter in Handbook of Research on Academic Libraries as Partners in Data Science Ecosystems (Chapter 11, p. 209-232). This work describes the results of the authors' research in association with the Ithaka S+R project, together with advice for libraries just beginning to explore offering data services. The national report for that project, Fostering Data Literacy, is available at https://sr.ithaka.org/publications/fostering-data-literacy/

Appendix C Survey Instrument

The survey instrument used for this study, created and run in Qualtrics. The instrument was exported to Word format for deposit and lightly reformatted for readability

Appendix D: Code Files

The R code (create-analysis-data.R) with which analysis was performed and the markdown file (Analysis.Rmd) with which tables and graphs were created

Appendix B: Consent Form

Consent form for the Qualtrics survey

A Day in the Life: Science Edition, dataset

The authors conducted a survey of and interviews with data librarians in the sciences about their education, continuing education, services and tools. The book chapter presents a summary of both. This dataset represents only the de-identified survey responses, and is in Excel format