RESOURCE: Keeping Up With… Big Data 2

The latest issue of the Association of College and Research Library’s (ACRL) Keeping Up With… publication is devoted to big data. Written by Mark Bieraugel (Business Librarian at California Polytechnic State University), it covers the nuts and bolts of the topic and offers a bibliography that includes sections such as “Big Data and the Academy,” “Privacy and Criticism,” “Tutorials,” and “Sandboxes.”

Bieraugel advises humanities and social science librarians to recognize that “big data is becoming more commonplace in their disciplines as well, and is no longer restricted to corpus linguistics.” He goes on to advocate for the role of libraries in data curation: “Librarians also need to embrace a role in making big datasets more useful, visible and accessible by creating taxonomies, designing metadata schemes, and systematizing retrieval methods.”