Data Information Literacy : Librarians, Data and the Education of a New Generation of Researchers

Abstract

FOREWORDThis book is the second in the Purdue Information Literacy Handbooks series. The book fulfills the purpose of the series, which is to promote evidence-based practice in teaching information literacy competencies through the lens of different academic disciplines. Information literacy implies the ability to find, manage, and use information in any format, and editors Carlson and Johnston apply it to the format of raw data. They coined the term data information literacy as an application of information literacy in the context of research. Since much data is accessible on the Web now and federal agencies are encouraging reuse of data, rather than re-creating data sets, librarians have embraced the opportunity to apply the organization and management principles of library and information science to data.Data Information Literacy: Librarians, Data, and the Education of a New Generation of Researchers is a timely work based on research funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Carlson and Johnston included librarians who worked with different scientific disciplines in the Data Information Literacy (DIL) project to write for this publication. Through interviews, the voices of faculty and graduate students revealed the need for a more effective way to learn DIL competencies and integrate them into their practice. The DIL project revealed specific skill gaps that graduate students in the sciences and engineering have related to managing, publishing, and preserving data sets for research. Librarians developed and assessed tailored educational strategies for addressing these gaps in five settings.Carlson and Johnston make a strong case for the role of librarians in teaching graduate students to manage, publish, and preserve data. They and the chapter authors give advice based on their experience for academic librarians to establish DIL programs at their institutions. This handbook will have value for librarians and library administrators in colleges and universities in which students participate in faculty research projects. With it, they can develop and implement plans to address an important, unmet educational need. Although vIII FOREWORD this book focuses on some of the science and engineering disciplines, those in the humanities and social sciences may be able to apply the methods used for identifying and addressing educational issues in their areas. This book will support library administrators who want their libraries to participate in the educational and research mission of their institutions. It will give practitioners guidance for developing such an effort. Sharon Weiner, EdD, MLS Series EditorProfessor and W. Wayne Booker Chair in Information Literacy, Purdue University Libraries Vice President, National Forum on Information Literacy August 2014 Ix PREFACEWe did not set out to write a book on the subject of data information literacy. Our initial intent was to explore the educational needs of graduate students in working with data and to report our findings to the research library community. ...

Research Data Management Training for Geographers: First Impressions

“…This can promote a lively discussion and participants are more willing to ask individual questions. Furthermore, in agreement with the findings of Carlson and Johnston [37], we highly recommend cooperating with discipline-specific research data repositories. If at all possible, the discussion of appropriate (discipline-specific) repositories should be integrated into the workshop.…”

“It's in the Syllabus”: Identifying Information Literacy and Data Information Literacy Opportunities Using a Grounded Theory Approach

“…However, many research fields lack established norms and practices in managing, sharing and preserving their data, making it difficult for researchers to respond to these pressures effectively. Recognizing a need, many librarians are developing "data information literacy" programs to raise awareness amongst researchers and help students improve their practices in working with research data (Carlson & Johnston, 2015;Peters & Vaughn, 2014). Data information literacy is distinguished from data literacy, which emphasizes interpreting, analyzing and other aspects of consuming data.…”

Investigating youth learning and data: Contexts, concepts, and connections

“…In much of the literature, data literacy is presented as a set of skills related to numeracy, statistics and computation (See for example, Gunther, 2007; van't Hooft et al, 2013; Fontichiaro & Oehrli, ). In terms of library‐based approaches to data literacy, we must look to the world of academic libraries, where models of data literacy focus on the management and use of data as a product of scholarly research (Prado & Marzal, ; Carlson & Johnston, , Shorish, ), and to the school library environment, which explores data skills primarily through the lens of statistics and visualization (Fontichiaro et al, 2017, Abilock et al, 2017). There is, however, a dearth of empirical models that situate data fluency within the context of Teen Services at the public library, even though programming that provides learning experiences with data is already occurring through digital media labs, makerspaces, and youth hackathons (Dankoski, 2018).…”