Investing and trading in strategic resources for academic data services: A case study

Abstract

While the meaning of “data” and its role in the research process has shifted numerous times over the past few decades, the role of the academic data librarian has remained focused on helping faculty and students access, use, and preserve all aspects of this distinctive class of information in support of the creation of new knowledge. At the same time, rapid advances in information technology, the explosive growth of digital data, and new methods of scholarly communication have collectively transformed data services in libraries, by impacting their operations, functions, and even their mission. Today, data librarianship is a field of knowledge that can require specific expertise in network technologies, information architecture, metadata, data structuring, text and data mining, data cleaning, manipulation, analysis and visualization, coding, data metrics, data management and data curation, data literacy and data ethics. As a consequence, library services related to research data continue to be a developing area where the responsibilities and practices of data librarianship within academic libraries are generally not yet firmly established. This paper offers an overview of the strategic planning and establishment of research data services within a Canadian university campus library. The University of Toronto Scarborough (UTSC) Library is located on the eastern edge of the City of Toronto, one of three campuses that make up the larger University of Toronto system. Primarily an undergraduate community,...