Is data management a new “digitisation”? A change of the role of librarians in the context of changing academic libraries’ tasks

Abstract

Academic libraries’ tasks have been evolving over the years. The changes have been stimulated by appearing of electronic resources, automated library systems, digital libraries and Open Access (OA) repositories. Librarians’ tasks and responsibilities in the academic environment have been evolving in accordance with new tasks they were expected to assume. A few years ago there was a discussion during which an attempt was made to answer the question if a digital librarian is still a librarian. Digital librarians were expected to acquire a number of new skills and knowledge which were supposed to allow them to manage and organize the digital library and handle all the specialized tasks of massive digitization, storage, access and reference services. The popularization of OA gave rise to new changes. The role of librarians evolved towards becoming specialists who not only supervised the process of uploading resources on open repositories, provided the training for academic staff, but also promoted the idea of OA. The evolution of the idea of open access to the results of scientific research towards open access to research data, the advent of Data Science and Open Research Data (ORD) management were all lively discussed. The academic staff were faced with a new and difficult tasks of collecting, describing and disseminating the research data. Moreover, the academics were supposed to take advantage and care of the citation impact of their scholarly works. As a result, librarians started learning about ORD management...