Celia Emmelhainz (Colby College) has written a post at Hack Library School on Things You Can Do as a Library Student to Prepare for a Career as a Data Librarian. She discusses the type of work that data librarians perform, the skills that define them, and offers suggestions on how to learn data skills. Some of the skills held by data librarians listed by Emmelhainz include:
- Teach data or statistical literacy as well as information literacy
- Provide “data reference” for people who need help finding data or analyzing in online tools (like the US Census website)
- Help fellow librarians to overcome their fears and help patrons find data, just like they help people find books, websites, and multimedia sources
- Lead ethnographic interviews and analyze qualitative data in NVIVO and Atlas.ti
- Can use Excel, Stata, R, and/or SPSS to produce statistical results
- Learn project management, assessment, or library metrics
dh+lib Review
This post was produced through a cooperation between Caitlin Christian-Lamb, Rebecca Dowson, Jan Lampaert, Bobby Smiley, and Kristen Totleben (Editors-at-large for the week), Zach Coble (Editor for the week), Sarah Potvin (Site Editor), and Caro Pinto and Roxanne Shirazi (dh+lib Review Editors).