Posted on Inside Higher Ed by Steve Kolowich on April 3 2012:
BALTIMORE — The ability to work well with data is understood to be an increasingly crucial skill as universities aim to preserve, sort and discover information that emerges from research.
But several studies, revealed here at the annual meeting of the Coalition for Networked Information, suggest that higher education has so far fallen short of preparing research faculty and university information workers to handle those tasks.
An ethnographic study of 23 faculty members, postdoctoral fellows, graduate students and other researchers, conducted by the anthropologists Lori Jahnke and Andrew Asher on behalf of the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), found that none had received formal training in data management — “nor do they express satisfaction with their level of expertise,” according to a summary of the report.
“Researchers are learning on the job in an ad hoc fashion,” explained Rachel Frick, director of the Digital Library Federation at CLIR, quoting the report.
The ethnographers also found that “[m]etadata and documentation is only of interest if it helps a researcher complete their work,” and that researchers are generally ignorant of the data services that librarians are able to provide.
In another, less formal study, CLIR took a snapshot of the landscape of library and information studies (LIS) programs. It found that formal training in data management is hard to come by, even for aspiring librarians. Only five universities offered “dedicated programs” in data management as part of their LIS offerings, according to Frick.
Learning how to properly manage research data is often perceived as a “substandard choice” for aspiring academics, Frick says. “This should be a defined professional path and not a secondary career choice,” she said, adding that building more explicit data management concentrations into LIS graduate programs would help elevate the skill set to a more appropriate level of respectability.
A delegation from the University of North Texas spoke about a three-year initiative at North Texas to investigate what specific skills such a program would need in order to certify good data managers for academe. The university is building four online, competency-based courses for its own graduate LIS program. It plans to launch the first two courses — Digital Curation & Data Management Fundamentals; and Tools, Applications & Media Structure — this summer.
Apart from the scarcity of data training through LIS programs, universities have not paid much heed to data management and reporting standards now required by certain federal funding agencies, according to additional data collected by investigators at CLIR and North Texas.
Of the 220 universities receiving the most grant funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health, only 61 (28 percent) have publicly available policies on how researchers should handle and share their data. Of the top 50 universities receiving NSF grants, half have published policies.
Inside Higher Ed
SLA Toronto has once again partnered with Infomart to establish the SLA Toronto Infomart Student-to-Conference Awards. With Infomart‘s generous support, 2 students will be chosen to each receive a $1,500 grant to attend the SLA Annual Conference in Chicago, Illinois from July 15-18, 2012.
“The Infomart Student-to-Conference Awards program is an effort to identify and encourage students who will make a impact in their profession as media intelligence and research professionals,” says Jonathan Harris, Managing Director of Infomart.
The SLA Conference is the one time a year when members gather from around the world. This annual event is an exemplary opportunity to learn, connect, and cultivate one’s career in the information profession. “The SLA Toronto Chapter is immensely grateful to partner with Infomart in giving these grants to deserving students who are the future of the special libraries profession. Attending the conference provides an invaluable experience for these future leaders.“, says Laura Warner, 2012 SLA Toronto Chapter President.
Infomart is Canada’s leading media intelligence agency with more than 25 years of delivering media monitoring and research solutions to Canada’s best-informed institutions. Covering print, social media platforms, radio, television, and online news, Infomart gives you the intelligence you need to optimize your media strategies, saving time, saving money, and fueling more effective and efficient media-related decisions that contribute to your bottom line. At the end of the day, Infomart helps Canadian companies, agencies, and organizations drive bottom-line efficiencies by providing fast, relevant and accurate media monitoring, research, and reporting solutions.
Two students will be selected to receive this award by the SLA Toronto Executive Board. Applicants must be willing to serve on the Executive or Advisory Board of the Toronto Chapter in the 2013 Chapter year, and the essays of the award recipients will be published in The Courier, SLA Toronto’s newsletter.
Eligibility
- Applicants must be currently enrolled in an accredited library or information science program during the 2011/12 academic school year and be interested in a career in special librarianship.
- The chosen recipients may not accept a travel award for the 2012 conference from any other SLA Division or Chapter.
- The chosen recipients must serve on the SLA Toronto Chapter Executive or Advisory Boards in the 2013 Chapter year.
- The chosen recipients must attend the SLA Conference in Chicago, Illinois from July 15-18, 2012.
- The chosen recipients must submit a copy of their conference registration, travel and accommodation receipts, and all other relevant receipts pertaining to conference attendance to the Awards Chair (Claire Lysnes) in order to receive the grant, which will be reimbursed following the conference.
- The chosen recipients will be asked to engage with Award sponsor, Infomart; Chapter Executive Board members; and the Awards Chair, Claire Lysnes, before or after the conference, in order to acknowledge the generous contribution of sponsor, Infomart.
Application Procedures
- Applicants must prepare a written statement, in English, of up to 500 words on what they hope to gain from the conference experience.
- Applicants must also provide a current résumé along with up to three references.
- Applicants should submit these documents, along with their address, telephone number, and email address no later than April 9, 2012 5pm to Awards Chair, Claire Lysnes (clysnes@gmail.com).
- The chosen recipients will be notified during the week of April 23, 2012.
Questions can be directed to Awards Chair, Claire Lysnes at clysnes@gmail.com.
Thank you,
Laura Warner, SLA Toronto Chapter President and Claire Lysnes, SLA Toronto Awards Chair
Claire Lysnes
clysnes@gmail.com
The Library Day in the Life Project is a semi-annual event coordinated by Bobbi Newman of Librarian by Day. Twice a year librarians, library staff and library students from all over the globe share a day (or week) in their life through blog posts, photos, video and Twitter updates.
I’m blogging during Library Day in the Life Round 8, January 30th through February 5th, 2012.
As an academic think tank, our primary goal is to publish as much as we can. However, the time lag between finishing a research paper and having it published can often be more than a year. To facilitate and accelerate getting our work out of the think tank and into our community, I created the MPI Working Paper Series. We publish working papers so that the most current research can be released into fellow researchers as quickly as possible; once these working papers are published in a journal, I replace the working paper with a link to the published version in the journal. Voila! Rapid Research!
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Lunch time! a quick sandwich with a colleague. While at lunch, I receive 30 new emails. Arrgh!
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Here at the MPI our community of researchers is global. One of our senior research scientists has been visiting us for the past two weeks and is returning to Vancouver this evening. She will need to access our data and documents remotely, so I’m setting up her laptop with VPN access.
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Just got a random request for any research existing on cultural (arts) patterns between urban and sub-urban populations. Uh, no.
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Signing up for various workshops on Assessment in Academic Libraries, and discussing an interesting report released last year entitled “Redefining the Academic Library: Managing the Migration to Digital Information Services“.
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Darn – I began writing my bio blurb for the SLA Courier and totally got distracted. Better finish it up and get it to the editor ASAP. I use EverNote for stuff like this so I can access my brain waves from anywhere.
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Which reminds me – I meant to find the podcast from Sunday’s ReCivilization, Don Tapscott’s new radio show. Don interviewed John Seely Brown. Very interesting stuff.
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OOH! Zotero 3.0 has been released. Looking forward to messing around with it. I have been using Zotero to manage our citations database for about six months. Before that I used EndNote, but I was frustrated with the inability for my distributed research team to share citation libraries. Zotero makes it much easier. My researchers think I’m a life saver since introducing them to citation management – it really saves them time. I love that they think I’m a super star 
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Playing around with Paper.li. I wish I could publish tweets from a particular day — or maybe it can and I just haven’t figured it out yet. Twapperkeeper also looks fun – oh, wait — looks like HootSuite ate them. Hmm.
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Renewing domain names. Moving to a new DNS service. Updating blogs. Various system tidying – up.
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Gotta go – time to pick up my boy from daycare. Over and out for now!