Big Data for Hospital Librarians – Are We There, Yet?

In the NNLM Big Data in Healthcare: Exploring Emerging Roles course, we asked participants, as they progressed through the course to consider the following questions: Do you think health sciences librarians should get involved with big data in healthcare? Where should librarians get involved, if you think they should? If you think they should not, explain why. You may also combine a “should/should not” approach if you would like to argue both sides. NNLM will feature responses from different participants over the coming weeks. Written by Elanor Pickens, Medical Librarian, Portsmouth Regional Hospital, Portsmouth, NH “Big data” is a term that has been recently appearing in the literature of academic librarianship. However, as a hospital librarian, may I consider this justification enough to explore its applicability to my current position? The definition of big data is multi-faceted and covered elsewhere, and I will refer readers on (Gandomi & Haider, 2015). Here I simply seek to understand my potential role in this field. Proposed by Martin (2016) is a framework of five basic categories, within which librarians may find at least one opportunity in supporting data science activities. One such role that the hospital librarian may engage in might be found within the “Literacy” domain, through teaching. This may include remaining informed about the various programming languages and software (R, Python, SAS, etc.), and their strengths and weaknesses, so that we ma...
Source: NN/LM Middle Atlantic Region Blog - Category: Databases & Libraries Authors: Tags: Data Science Source Type: news