POST: Things You Can Do as a Library Student to Prepare for a Career as a Data Librarian

Celia Emmelhainz (Colby College) has written a post at Hack Library School onĀ 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 ā€œdata referenceā€ 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

Author: Zach Coble

Zach is the Digital Scholarship Specialist at New York University.