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.

LOVE THIS!!

A similar video was created by students at UBC in the spring and has received over 1.2 million hits on YouTube since April. Many other universities have produced Lip Dub videos, for example, Boston University and Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona.

The organizers are hoping to gather 30-40 members of the UTL community to participate. Participants would be filmed walking down College Street pushing book carts, holding books and assisting students regarding library inquiries.

All members of the UTL community are invited to participate! The filming schedule will be:

• 12:10PM – 1:30PM: SECTION CHOREOGRAPHY
• 1:30PM – 3:00PM: WALK-THROUGH
• 3:00PM – 4:00PM: RUN-THROUGH
• 4:00PM – 5:00PM: FILM

Participants’ time would be required from 12:10 – 5:00 pm.

If you would like to be part of the UofT Lip Dub video please let me know or contact the project coordinator, sandra.zhou@utoronto.ca, directly.

Proceeds from student-secured sponsorship of the video will be donated to The Hospital for Sick Children.

Amidst recent public outcry against proposed Toronto Public Library cuts, City Councillor Doug Ford said he “wouldn’t have a clue” who Margaret Atwood was if he saw her. He has since backtracked. He also complained that “I’ve got more libraries in my area than I have Tim Hortons.” Actually, Etobicoke has 39 Tim Hortons and 13 library branches. It doesn’t really matter whether Doug or his brother Rob, the Mayor, would recognize a Canadian literary icon. What matters is that we Torontonians love and use our library, at a very reasonable cost.

One of Rob Ford’s election mantras was that he would run Toronto like a business. Now that he’s mayor, the city is “dedicated to delivering customer service excellence.” That’s the new tagline on the city’s press releases. Meanwhile, all City of Toronto departments have been directed to cut 10 per cent from their budgets. Respect the taxpayer, remember? So perhaps we must simply accept library cuts as business restructuring.

What about the 72 per cent of Torontonians who access the library’s 11 million items, making it the busiest urban library system in the world? Or the 55 per cent who said in a July survey that, if their local councillor supported closing library branches, it would affect their municipal vote “a great deal”? Tough cookies. Business is business.

But wait a minute! If this city is to be run like a business (a Ford mantra, not mine), shouldn’t our Mayor and city council prioritize, strategize and allocate money efficiently? Shouldn’t it cut high-cost, underperforming parts of the organization, and preserve or even strengthen the low-cost, high-value portions, seeking value for money? No intelligent business restructuring cuts 10 per cent blindly from all parts of the enterprise.

The Toronto Public Library runs on 19 cents per day per citizen. For this reasonable sum, 32 million items are borrowed each year. For context, the Toronto Police Service costs $1 per citizen per day, five times as much as the library. Waste management costs 37 cents. The Vancouver Public Library costs $80 per citizen per year; the Toronto Public Library comes in at $68. If I were running this city as a business, I would say the library looks like it is delivering excellent value.

Where would the 10-per-cent budget cuts come from, anyhow? Would it be from our library’s settlement and housing seminars for newcomers to Canada? From the library’s workshops on résumés and interviewing skills for those seeking employment? Perhaps some brave councillor would like to explain the axing of Homework Help for Teens, a free evening tutoring program, or the popular Business Seminar Series, which helps new entrepreneurs get off the ground? There’s no good place to cut when an organization is already delivering high-value services at a reasonable price.

Meanwhile, there are two priceless features of each of the 18 million annual library visits in this city. First, sharing wisdom through the library and its programs increases the wealth of our community. We learn, innovate and enrich our city by sharing knowledge through books, films, lectures and discussion. Second, the library is completely democratic. It provides access to information, culture and leisure for new immigrants and established Canadians, to children and the elderly, and to all Torontonians whether they’re rich or going through tough times.

Speaking of tough times, in which we’re told that all belts must tighten: Such are the precise times in which those with less disposable income need access to good libraries more than ever. Those who can’t buy books need to access the library’s collections, not to see acquisitions or library hours cut. The destruction of the ancient Library of Alexandria is one of the intellectual tragedies of antiquity.

The public anger in Toronto over proposed library cuts shows that modern citizens also know a library’s worth. The Fords might pay attention to former Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley, who once said: “If you cut funding to libraries, you cut the lifeblood of our communities.”

Of course, with 10 per cent off the library budget, each Torontonian would be $6.80 richer. Every year! What would I do with my savings? I could console myself by going to Tim Hortons. I’d have a large iced cappuccino, a yogurt and two Timbits, please. Oops – $6.80 isn’t enough for that. If someone is going to claim to use their business smarts to run this city better, they’d better not gut my library without even saving me enough for a snack at my favourite coffee shop.

Vincent Lam is a writer and ER physician. His book Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures won the 2006 Giller Prize. He is participating in the “Why My Library Matters to Me” contest for lunch with one of 11 distinguished Toronto writers, sponsored by the Toronto Public Library Workers Union. (Toronto residents can enter at ourpubliclibrary.to/contest.)

TWIL #51: Michael Porter (Library Renewal) from Jaap van de Geer on Vimeo.

Most students never make it this far.

This is one of the sobering truths these librarians, representing a group of Illinois universities, have learned over the course of a two-year, five-campus ethnographic study examining how students view and use their campus libraries: students rarely ask librarians for help, even when they need it. The idea of a librarian as an academic expert who is available to talk about assignments and hold their hands through the research process is, in fact, foreign to most students. Those who even have the word “librarian” in their vocabularies often think library staff are only good for pointing to different sections of the stacks.

Read the entire article here.

TEDxLibrariansTO Speaker: Amy Buckland – TEDx LibrariansTO.

Amy Buckland is the eScholarship, ePublishing & Digitization Coordinator at McGill University Library, where she is responsible for scholarly communication, publishing initiatives, and making rare items from special collections available to the world through digitization.

For more information, please visit her speaker’s page.

Critics say they’re obsolete, but New York’s main branch is a reminder of what the Internet can never do

The main branch of the New York Public Library

by Laura Miller

“…Let’s set aside the obvious rejoinder that many citizens can’t afford e-readers and, furthermore, can only access Google via a library computer. The anniversary of the NYPL’s main building is an occasion to talk about why the library needs to be a place as well as an ethereal mass of data residing somewhere in “the cloud.” Not everything we need or want to know about the world can be transmitted via a screen, and not every experience can be digitized.”

My post is featured today – I’d love to receive feedback! Check it out at Changing the World Through Mentorship.

DATE May 16–17, 2011

LOCATION
McMaster University Burlington
Ron Joyce Center
4350 South Service Road
Burlington, Ontario

Universities today are facing unprecedented pressures fueled in part by technological advances, transformations in scholarly communications, evolving student expectations, increased calls for accountability, and greater competition. Simultaneously, we are experiencing uncertainty in financial support owing to declines in public and private funding partnered with ever-increasing costs. The global financial crisis of 2008 has further compounded our challenges and has added a sense of urgency to the calls for transformation of our institutions. Never before have the challenges we face been as great or the opportunities as exciting. As E. Gordon Gee, president of Ohio State University, has stated, our choice is simple: “it’s reinvention or extinction.”

As an integral component in teaching, learning, and research on our campuses, libraries are at the heart of these changes. Our challenges are similar to those faced by our parent institutions and “reinvention or extinction” could be our call to arms as well. In an increasingly complex, information-rich world, how do we assure that we remain relevant? Perhaps more important, how do we establish ourselves and our libraries as change agents on our campuses? This time of uncertainty may be a window of opportunity that may close as quickly as it has opened. How do we prepare ourselves to take advantage of what may be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity?

The May 17 symposium at McMaster will bring together some of the leading thinkers in our profession—speakers, panelists, and participants—to generate solutions to the key challenges we face.

To register, click through to  The Future of the Academic Library: A Symposium.