By San | June 12, 2006
Tiffani Conner, Paula Lackie and Jen Darragh are working on the handouts for an ALA poster session and have found that defining “data” and “data librarian” clearly, in a concise manner, for a non-data audience is really hard. In addition, some of the sources they consulted (the Online Dictionary of Library and Information Science - ODLIS , Oxford English Dictionary ) were not adequate (ODLIS has data, data set, social science data set but the definitions are not that great). They also looked at Wikipedia, and there is nothing for data librarian. This raises a question: would IASSISTers be interested in crafting a definition of “Data Librarian” for Wikipedia? We can start by collecting comments in the blog, and then move it over to Wikipedia once we have a full definition. We’ve crafted a working definition (keep in mind that we are speaking to a traditional library audience) as a place to start. Data librarianship is an ad hoc term. In essence, it is the application of traditional librarianship principles and practices to data resources. Data librarianship involves one or more of the following; acquisition (collection development), organization (cataloging and metadata), and the implementation of appropriate user services
Comments? Suggestions? Please let us know. - Submitted by Jen Darragh