The Inaugural PNR Journal Club: Data Curation, Data Management, and Librarians

This article presents seven challenges identified by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) initiative and recommendations for overcoming those challenges  based on the project experience.   One of the BD2K identified obstacles of biomedical big data is the organization, management, and processing of data. The varied ways in which clinical data is collected makes it difficult to validate for consistency as well as discover for re-use. Another obstacle identified in the paper was the challenge of training researchers to use data effectively. The article primarily discusses this in the context of hiring a data manager and the difficulty of identifying a person that has the necessary combination of skills or the job. For members, this raised questions about what kinds of skills librarians should consider developing in order to be valued, useful members of these teams. Discussion revolved around several themes: challenges librarians face in identifying/occupying data science roles, the potential of promoting existing librarian skills and cultivating new skill sets, and the importance of networking and professional development. Journal club members cited librarian training in organizing and tagging/indexing data as well as enhancing data by connecting it to the published literature.  Several members called attention to the lack of published librarian contributions to data science, especially since this article was authored by a multi...
Source: Dragonfly - Category: Databases & Libraries Authors: Tags: Technology Training & Education Source Type: news