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.

SLA Toronto has once again partnered with Infomart to establish the SLA Toronto Infomart Student-to-Conference Awards. With Infomart‘s generous support, 2 students will be chosen to each receive a $1,500 grant to attend the SLA Annual Conference in Chicago, Illinois from July 15-18, 2012.

“The Infomart Student-to-Conference Awards program is an effort to identify and encourage students who will make a impact in their profession as media intelligence and research professionals,” says Jonathan Harris, Managing Director of Infomart.

The SLA Conference is the one time a year when members gather from around the world. This annual event is an exemplary opportunity to learn, connect, and cultivate one’s career in the information profession. “The SLA Toronto Chapter is immensely grateful to partner with Infomart in giving these grants to deserving students who are the future of the special libraries profession. Attending the conference provides an invaluable experience for these future leaders.“, says Laura Warner, 2012 SLA Toronto Chapter President.

Infomart is Canada’s leading media intelligence agency with more than 25 years of delivering media monitoring and research solutions to Canada’s best-informed institutions. Covering print, social media platforms, radio, television, and online news, Infomart gives you the intelligence you need to optimize your media strategies, saving time, saving money, and fueling more effective and efficient media-related decisions that contribute to your bottom line. At the end of the day, Infomart helps Canadian companies, agencies, and organizations drive bottom-line efficiencies by providing fast, relevant and accurate media monitoring, research, and reporting solutions.

Two students will be selected to receive this award by the SLA Toronto Executive Board. Applicants must be willing to serve on the Executive or Advisory Board of the Toronto Chapter in the 2013 Chapter year, and the essays of the award recipients will be published in The Courier, SLA Toronto’s newsletter.

Eligibility

• Applicants must be currently enrolled in an accredited library or information science program during the 2011/12 academic school year and be interested in a career in special librarianship.
• The chosen recipients may not accept a travel award for the 2012 conference from any other SLA Division or Chapter.
• The chosen recipients must serve on the SLA Toronto Chapter Executive or Advisory Boards in the 2013 Chapter year.
• The chosen recipients must attend the SLA Conference in Chicago, Illinois from July 15-18, 2012.
• The chosen recipients must submit a copy of their conference registration, travel and accommodation receipts, and all other relevant receipts pertaining to conference attendance to the Awards Chair (Claire Lysnes) in order to receive the grant, which will be reimbursed following the conference.
• The chosen recipients will be asked to engage with Award sponsor, Infomart; Chapter Executive Board members; and the Awards Chair, Claire Lysnes, before or after the conference, in order to acknowledge the generous contribution of sponsor, Infomart.

Application Procedures

• Applicants must prepare a written statement, in English, of up to 500 words on what they hope to gain from the conference experience.
• Applicants must also provide a current résumé along with up to three references.
• Applicants should submit these documents, along with their address, telephone number, and email address no later than April 9, 2012 5pm to Awards Chair, Claire Lysnes (clysnes@gmail.com).
• The chosen recipients will be notified during the week of April 23, 2012.

Questions can be directed to Awards Chair, Claire Lysnes at clysnes@gmail.com.

Thank you,

Laura Warner, SLA Toronto Chapter President and Claire Lysnes, SLA Toronto Awards Chair

Claire Lysnes
clysnes@gmail.com

I’m blogging during Library Day in the Life Round 8, January 30th through February 5th, 2012.

As an academic think tank, our primary goal is to publish as much as we can. However, the time lag between finishing a research paper and having it published can often be more than a year. To facilitate and accelerate getting our work out of the think tank and into our community, I created the MPI Working Paper Series. We publish working papers so that the most current research can be released into fellow researchers as quickly as possible; once these working papers are published in a journal, I replace the working paper with a link to the published version in the journal. Voila! Rapid Research!

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Lunch time! a quick sandwich with a colleague. While at lunch, I receive 30 new emails. Arrgh!

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Here at the MPI our community of researchers is global. One of our senior research scientists has been visiting us for the past two weeks and is returning to Vancouver this evening. She will need to access our data and documents remotely, so I’m setting up her laptop with VPN access.

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Just got a random request for any research existing on cultural (arts) patterns between urban and sub-urban populations. Uh, no.

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Signing up for various workshops on Assessment in Academic Libraries, and discussing an interesting report released last year entitled “Redefining the Academic Library: Managing the Migration to Digital Information Services“.

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Darn – I began writing my bio blurb for the SLA Courier and totally got distracted. Better finish it up and get it to the editor ASAP. I use EverNote for stuff like this so I can access my brain waves from anywhere.

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Which reminds me – I meant to find the podcast from Sunday’s ReCivilization, Don Tapscott’s new radio show. Don interviewed John Seely Brown. Very interesting stuff.

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OOH! Zotero 3.0 has been released. Looking forward to messing around with it. I have been using Zotero to manage our citations database for about six months. Before that I used EndNote, but I was frustrated with the inability for my distributed research team to share citation libraries. Zotero makes it much easier. My researchers think I’m a life saver since introducing them to citation management – it really saves them time. I love that they think I’m a super star

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Playing around with Paper.li. I wish I could publish tweets from a particular day — or maybe it can and I just haven’t figured it out yet. Twapperkeeper also looks fun – oh, wait — looks like HootSuite ate them. Hmm.

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Renewing domain names. Moving to a new DNS service. Updating blogs. Various system tidying – up.

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Gotta go – time to pick up my boy from daycare. Over and out for now!

Some of the world’s biggest tech companies from Google to Facebook are data-driven, but few startup founders have any idea what a data scientist does, never mind whether they should hire one. Here is VentureBeat’s guide to data science for startups.

What does a data scientist do?

DJ Patil led LinkedIn’s data science team and is now the Data Scientist in residence at Greylock Partners. His free ebook “Building Data Science Teams” provides an excellent introduction to the basic areas of data science and how to build a team.

For startups, the most relevant applications of data science are probably decision science and product and marketing analytics. Decision science, as the name implies, allows you to identify and monitor key metrics for your business and answer strategic questions like “Which country should we expand into next?” or “What is the impact on the business if we lose this client?”. Google’s data science team even drives its HR policies.

Product analytics covers anything from how users are reacting to new features to developing standalone data products. LinkedIn’s “People you may know” feature and Amazon’s recommendation system are data-driven features that attempt to keep users on the site longer or drive more sales.

Using data to showcase or market a product is the domain of marketing analytics. One of the best known examples is okCupid’s okTrends blog, which features posts like “The case for an older woman” or “The 4 big myths of profile photos”. The blog drives massive traffic to the site and is regularly covered in the media.

Who are the data scientists?

Since data science is a new area, practitioners often migrate from other fields. You may see maths, statistics, machine learning or computer science on their resumes or a data-intensive field like meteorology. Data scientists want to be of central importance to a business, especially when it’s a startup. The best data scientists are both intensely curious and great communicators. They answer important questions and tell good stories using data.

What is data infrastructure? 

Data scientists need specialized tools to manage and process large amounts of data. The minimum you need to get started is simple data access, usually via a database. Larger-scale or less uniform data may require a tool like Hadoop, an open source platform for distributed processing of large data sets across clusters of computers, as well as someone with the technical expertise to use it. Data stores like Cassandra are designed to perform well on very large datasets. These are some of the most commonly used tools, but there are many others for tasks such as streaming data collection, querying non-relational databases and job scheduling.

When do you need to hire a data scientist?

VentureBeat talked to data scientist Cathy O’Neil, who herself works for a startup (Intent Media), about when you need to hire a data scientist. If your data volume is growing, you don’t know if you are seeing noise or information in your data, or in general, if you are not running your business sufficiently quantitatively, then you may need to consider hiring.

Read the interview with Cathy O’Neil.

LOVE THIS!!

Here’s a great tribute from Wired:

An article in today’s HBR Blog Network caught my eye: Work and Vacation Should Go  Together, by Ron Ashkenas. Catchy title aside (guaranteed to lure anyone who’s snuck in some work during vacation time, myself included and I suspect many of you), the article has an interesting and novel perspective on how we manage work and personal life. For years I’ve been trying to achieve that elusive ‘balance’ that’s supposed to be optimal, and have been failing. Which is why this phrase got my attention:

The reality for many of us these days is that our professional lives bleed into our personal lives. The boundaries are increasingly permeable and movable. We check our emails in the evenings and weekends. We delay or miss family events because we can’t leave the office. And when we do, we take our communications devices with us so that we can stay connected to work.

Guilty as charged. But the thing is, I really *like* what I do. I love my job. It energizes me and gives me a lot of personal satisfaction. I also believe that it makes me smarter, which is important to me. Granted, I need a break now and then and vacations are wonderful. But my ideal vacation is having free time to do what I want to do, when I want to do it. Which includes thinking about interesting projects I’d like to start, working out challenging problems in my work, and talking to the many interesting people who are part of my work life. Increasingly, I am unable to separate the people in my life into categories: I am fortunate to work with people who have become dear friends, and even had the pleasure of having friends who have become colleagues as well.

Here’s an approach I can get behind:

Focusing on work-life “integration” instead of work-life “balance” has at least a couple of implications: First (and the one that I like the most) is that we can stop feeling guilty about scheduling calls during our vacations or checking our emails at night; and by the same token not feel guilty about talking with our spouses, friends, and family members during work time.

The second implication is that we no longer split up our time so rigidly between “work hours” and “non-work hours.” Instead, let’s be flexible about when and how we accomplish both our work goals and our personal goals. Obviously some of this has to be negotiated with others, both at work (who is on call for customers?) and home (who gets to use the car?). But the point is to make this a natural part of how we organize our lives instead of a special perk or exceptional situation.

While I’m very lucky to have a workplace that supports this kind of integration, not every employer has seen the light. But I think we’re getting there. At least, I hope so. Because one thing we know is that happy employees are capable of incredible things.

I encourage you to read the entire article, and the comments, too.

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.