Librarians and Big Data: Should We Be Involved?

Written by: Caroline Marshall, MLS, AHIP, Senior Medical Librarian, Public Services, Cedars-Sinai Medical Library, Los Angeles, CA There is a great deal of discussion about Big Data. We all think other people are doing it, we think we should be doing it, but we are not sure how to get involved (Tattersall & Grant, 2016). There have been Calls to Action (Martin, 2016) about Big Data and an affirmation in several studies that librarians should get involved. It is almost as if we are going to miss the Big Data train if we don’t jump on board right away. Big Data is not going away but we, as librarians, need to ascertain how involved we can get depending on staffing and time. Librarian skills for Big data have been identified more or less along the following bullet points Information Curation In-Depth research Digital Scanning, Preservation Cloud Data Expansion Data Visualization Collaboration, Teaching and Facilitation Librarians are no strangers to Big Data and we often use these skills already; we use usage data in journal evaluation and renewals. We look at interlibrary loan data to ascertain how quickly we are turning requests around and as an indication of what journals we should purchase. We work with medical staff on citation management software teaching them how to manage, organize and share large quantities of citations for their publications. Librarians perform information curation such as creating digital archives and assigning metadata that will provide acc...
Source: MCR News - Category: Databases & Libraries Authors: Tags: Community College/Academic Libraries Data Science Health Sciences Source Type: news