New Roles for the 21st Century, remarks by TK Sanwand, Lisa Federer, Liz Liddy, and Ron Larson at the 2012 ARL Fall Forum, convened by Jim Neal. Welcome to this session, New Roles for the 21st Century. This is the final program session in our forum. Let me first start with three quick announcements. First, as Chevy Chase would say, I'm Carla Stofel and you're not. Carla was called back to Arizona and I was asked to step in as her replacement to moderate this session. Second, there have been lots of questions over the course of the two days about the availability of the slides being used by our speakers. Those slides will be posted on the ARL website and will be fully available. Give us a couple days after the forum to get that done. And third, I hope you enjoyed the lunch. I was out on the Chesapeake all night catching those crabs, so it was a nice treat. I know a lot of people were concerned they were going to go home hungry, but one never goes home hungry from ARL. So let's turn to our session. We really are going to add two new lenses to our conversation. The lens of individuals who are working in these new types of professional roles in our research libraries. And then the second lens that we'll look at in this session is the view of leadership from our information schools. We've decided to break this into sort of part A and part B, and then we'll try to mash it up at the end. Part A, I'm going to ask the two librarians to speak and then we'll ask some questions and discuss briefly, and then we'll turn to our two dean colleagues and do the same thing. So let me move on with the first part of the session today. We heard today over several presentations, the new types of positions we're creating in research libraries and the types of individuals given their backgrounds, their experience and expertise that they're bringing to these new types of assignments. We have two very, very provocative assignments to consider today. The first speaker, and I'm going to introduce them both and then ask them to come up in sequence. The first speaker is Tiffany Kay, or TK Sanguand. She is the Human Rights Archivist at the University of Texas. She works with their Human Rights Documentation Initiative. She's also the Brazilian Studies Subject Specialist in the Latin American collection. And over the last three years she has worked with non-governmental organizations around the world, Africa, Asia, Latin America and the U.S. to prepare and preserve their Human Rights Documentation. I'm particularly interested in her insights and reflections because I have three individuals working on my staff in the libraries at Columbia University who are full-time Human Rights Archivists working on a different set of Human Rights materials, but experiencing I'm sure some of the same wonderful opportunities that TK is. The second speaker in this part A is Lisa Federer. She's a Health and Life Sciences Librarian at UCLA, Biomedical Library. She's the Liaison to Public Health Psychology and several medical departments. But she is also serving on an NIH-funded informationist position to a UCLA research team, which is investigating the use of Terahertz technology to measure swelling in the eye. We're going to understand what her role is as a partner in that research team and her role as informationist. I think these will be two very interesting perspectives and I welcome our colleagues to the podium. Thank you for the introduction. So good afternoon everyone and I want to thank ARL for the invitation to be here today. It's been really exciting being able to learn from such an esteemed group of colleagues. Before I get started I want to clear up any confusion around my job title. I noticed in the participant roster I'm listed as a human rights activist of the University of Texas Libraries. This isn't completely untrue, but my official title is the Human Rights Archivist, as well as being the Brazilian Studies Librarian. So while I maintain these traditional titles of archivist and librarian, I'm going to talk about my work today through the lens of socially responsible data curation. And I'll discuss what this means. I'll discuss how we arrived at this orientation, why it's important for academic libraries to consider, and some of the competencies that we should be looking for in this model of socially responsible data curation. Just trying to advance the presentation. Sorry this did work for the presentation. So before I delve into what my work actually entails, I'd like to explain how I arrived at this term of socially responsible data curation. When I was invited to speak at this forum, I was actually a little surprised that I was asked to speak about data curation. As I'd never really couched my work in those terms, I've always looked at my work through the lens of archives. But as I researched more, I began to see how the data curation framework could be a useful way to conceptualize my work, despite the distinct disciplinary differences in the discourse. Most discussions around data curation revolve around scientific data. However, the Human Rights Documentation Initiative, the project with which I work, contends with massive amounts of digital data that serves and or is a byproduct of humanities, social sciences, and legal-based research. So as I did some additional research into data curation, I realized how relevant the issues raised by this framework were to archives, and I was surprised that they were not discussed more across different subsections of the information profession. The more I read about the work of data curation, the more I grappled with this forum's question or assumption of new roles within the information profession. Are my roles and responsibilities as a data curator really new for the information profession? I have to say I'm not completely convinced of that, though of course the context in which these responsibilities are carried out are rapidly changing. Much of the recent data curation literature that I found was published in journals relating to academic libraries, as opposed to archives, and this was surprising to me because data curation strikes me as essentially an archival function. However, I realized that some of the newness of the data curator role may be attributed to the preservation aspect that academic librarians don't typically encounter in their day-to-day work, but of course this is common to archivists and record managers. Conversely, while there are aspects of data curation that are not traditionally archival, there are by no means outside the scope of professional archival responsibilities. So while much of the data curation literature discusses the need for life cycle management of records, which often means being involved with the data from its inception or even before, this implies that the information professional is in conversation or even embedded with these data creators. This close relationship with presumably a scholar is one that is more often discussed in academic libraries, especially as academic libraries move towards a trend of embedded librarianship with their research specialists and subject specialists. Archivists also maintain a close relationship with scholars, but this is typically seen as being contained within a reading room environment and not so much in the scholar's other environments. And while the life cycle management approach is relatively new to US archives that have historically served as a repository for inactive records, life cycle management of records is common in other places such as Europe. So I would argue that while aspects of digital curation can be considered new depending on your training as either a librarian or an archivist, they're certainly not new to the information professional profession. So now that I've made a brief case for why the role and responsibilities of a data curator are not so new, but rather an evolution of our professional duties, I'd like to return to this notion of social responsibility. Again, I'd like to posit that this notion of social responsibility isn't new to the information profession. Librarians have always been seen as champions of intellectual freedom and facilitators of democratic access to knowledge. Librarians protected patron privacy from the Patriot Act and public librarians are on the front lines of civil society providing social services computer literacy courses, resume workshops to underserved populations that don't have access to other resources. So in short, librarians have always served some sort of social good. Whereas librarians have this history of being advocates, archivists have long been guided by this notion of neutrality and that has caused many archivists to issue any actions that may be constituted as activists. So I agree with many postmodern archival theorists who argue that archivists should abandon this more passive neutral role and recognize their responsibility to ensure a historical record that is broadly representative. And thus, I believe the archival profession can learn a lot from this more librarian type advocacy ethos. So what does this have to do with data curation? As I mentioned earlier, most of the data curation discussions occur within the context of scientific data. But there's little discussion around data created in other domains and how and the impact of its loss if it's not preserved. And through my work with the Human Rights Documentation Initiative, I've confronted the enormous challenge of how to preserve and provide access to huge amounts of digital human rights documentation created on a multitude of different devices with little to no metadata. And without this material, we face an enormous gap in the historical record which in turn impacts scholarship and shapes our understanding of politics, the world and our humanity. So with this in mind, I want to pose a question. What responsibility does the information profession have to curate data in other fields? Whose data should we be collecting? Who is represented in that data? And for what purposes can and should this data be reused? What ethical responsibilities does a data curator have? And how can data curation serve a social good? Well, this consideration may at first seem outside the purview of academic libraries. I'd like to suggest the contrary. As professionals working in the fields of education and academic libraries, we are charged with providing access to diverse information resources and to educating new generations of leaders. And the information gathered through our data curation practice has a potential to play a pivotal role in our university's curriculum and educational process. And as was mentioned yesterday, our collections can also impact who we recruit to the profession. And additionally, this notion of social responsibility can also be tied into some of our institution's values. The University of Texas, one of our core values, is to serve as a catalyst for positive change in Texas and beyond. So with this university's strong academic focus in human rights and the library's existing strengths in human rights collections, a socially responsible data curation endeavor, such as the Human Rights Documentation Initiative, strongly aligned with both the university's and the library's strategic priorities. So I think now is a good time to segue into the work, describing the work that I do, and have termed socially responsible data curation. As was mentioned earlier, I'm the archivist for the UT Libraries Human Rights Documentation Initiative, or the HRDI. And the HRDI is an initiative of the University of Texas Libraries that works to preserve fragile human rights documentation around the world. I want to mention upfront that the HRDI did not originally conceive of itself as a socially responsible data curation project, but rather involved into one out of necessity. And the Human Rights Documentation Initiative was formed in 2008 with the financial support of the Bridgeway Foundation in another direction of our library's director, Dr. Fred Heath. And the idea for the HRDI grew out of a 2007 conference on human rights archives and documentation of how that Columbia University. And this conference was unique because it brought together different human rights documentation stokeholders such as human rights advocates, lawyers, activists, and archivists to discuss some of the pressing issues to digital human rights documentation. And through this discussion, it became clear that one of the primary concerns of human rights advocates that were creating and collecting this documentation was digital preservation. The legal actors and scholars are trying to access this documentation. Many grassroots human rights organizations turn to digital media such as digital video recorders and cell phones for its relative affordability and expediency in documenting these violations. However, this digital documentation is particularly susceptible to loss. You do the relative novelty of the media and the lack of established preservation practices. Small grassroots human rights organizations rarely have the resources, the expertise, or the time to ensure the long-term preservation of their work. And so these factors compounded with political repression greatly endanger the life of this digital documentation. And if this documentation is lost, it cannot be used for legal accountability efforts, research, educational purpose, and thus the negative impact to the historical record really is immeasurable. So UT Library is with its technological expertise and as the leading research library with a mandate to collect and provide access to teaching and research resources, we aim to address this preservation issue by establishing preservation partnerships with small grassroots human rights organizations that are creating this valuable documentation. Just to give you an idea of the organizations that we work with and where they're based, here's a list. All of these partners are either digitizing audiovisual resources or creating born digital audiovisual resources. So as you can imagine, preserving this material requires significant investment in digital storage and digital preservation infrastructure. So when the libraries first conceived this project, it envisioned a more traditional acquisition model in which human rights organizations would send their materials to UT, the libraries would digitize them and send the materials back to the records creators. This acquisition model, which calls for the physical custody materials, is what's familiar to most of us. However, when the HRDI began establishing its first partnership with the Kigali Genocide Memorial in Rwanda, it became clear that this traditional model of acquisition was no longer going to be sufficient. Record creators did not want to send their material to a distant repository for preservation. We learned that human rights organizations were extremely relinquished custody of their materials, even if it was for a short period of time. And one of the reasons for this is that this documentation serves immediate programming needs, be it advocacy or education. So removing the documentation from the context of its creation would severely disrupt the organization's operations. And from a preservation standpoint, of course, shipping the materials back and forth between organizations poses an additional risk to this already vulnerable documentation. And additionally, considering the U.S.'s relations with the countries with whom we work and histories of intervention, as in the case of El Salvador, or non-intervention in the case of Rwanda, it's not difficult to understand why human rights organizations are reluctant to release their materials to a large U.S. institution. So we had to find another model to facilitate the use of these rich information resources but also address the preservation and custody concerns. So drawing upon this post-custodial theory of archives, the HRDI decided to adopt a distributed archival model that would allow record creators to maintain physical custody of their materials but also work with archivists to help develop preservation and access solutions for the documentation. And this is the model that underlies our work of socially responsible data curation. The post-custodial model necessitates a life-cycle management approach, or the idea that archival preservation begins at the material's inception, not when they are no longer in high use. So through these partnerships, the HRDI provides our partner organizations with equipment and training and help them develop preservation practices that can be incorporated into the organization's existing workflows. And so as a result of this training, the organizations are able to digitize the material onsite and send the digital copies back to UT for long-term preservation. Should anything befall those original materials? The original materials remain with its creator and then we work with them to determine appropriate modes of access to these digital copies. And so a guiding principle of our work with this post-custodial model is that record creators are experts in their own records. And within the traditional archival model, record creators are really disempowered because these materials are taken away from their oversight and their expertise. And so within a post-custodial model, organizations are responsible for the organization and the description of the material. And on a practical level, we found that this is really necessary for organizations to describe their own material because the content often requires language skill sets and subject expertise that aren't particularly easy to find in Austin. And this is particularly true with our partnerships in Rwanda and Burma. However, more importantly, these local description and organization practices help build up preservation capacity within these small organizations and promotes their ownership of their cultural patrimony. So throughout the course of establishing these six partnerships, the HREDI learned that our partner organizations would not have worked with us had we not adopted this model, that allows them to maintain physical custody over their materials. And practically, this life cycle management approach that leaves custody in the hands of record creators and leverages the local labor and expertise helps address the scale involved with processing the large amounts of data generated. The value added information enables the data to be more readily reused by scholars, which in turn has helped the libraries develop deeper collaborations with our faculty around incorporating this data into their curriculum. So additionally, through these socially responsible partnerships with diverse organizations and consequently diverse data, the libraries have confronted some of the major digital curation challenges, namely scalable digital storage and privacy and rights management of the material. However, these challenges have also led to other exciting collaborative opportunities. For example, as UT libraries realize the unprecedented volume of data that we would receive through these partnerships, we sought out a collaboration with the University's Advanced Computing Center to help process some of the data. Additionally, the libraries are also participating in consortial digital preservation efforts, such as the Digital Preservation Network, or deep-in to strengthen its own digital preservation infrastructure but also contribute to these national efforts. And as we proceed into this era of big data, there is really no other choice but to address these problems and solutions collaboratively. So to conclude, I want to suggest some competencies for socially responsible data curation practices. And the first one here is Inter- and Inter-disciplinary Approaches. As I pointed out from the literature, there are skills that both libraries and archivists can bring to data curation practice. And training on one track may no longer be sufficient. Additionally, the information profession can gain great insights from other disciplines such as computer science and design, which I think John C. Brown's talk really exemplified for us. The second competency or skill is that polyglots are really valuable, and I mean this both in a literal and figurative sense. As we work towards collaborative solutions, we must necessarily be able to speak in different conceptual frameworks to connect with others in different disciplines. But we must also possess these different cultural competencies and language skills to be able to collaborate across linguistic and geographic boundaries. Third, I think subject expertise is still key. Subject expertise allows a data curator to better understand the information in their domain and guide decisions on how the data will be described, presented, and contextualized. And as the presentations mentioned yesterday, functional expertise is still critical in this time of transition within our profession. Four, critical writing and thinking skills are invaluable. And I debated including this one because it seems pretty obvious, but after hearing the statistics yesterday of the assessment of low percentages of undergraduate critical thinking and writing, I thought it was important to reiterate this point. The data and technology landscape is changing so rapidly that it's impossible for one to be an expert in all the tools and practices available. So it's necessary for data curators to be able to conceptualize larger issues and then critically decide which solutions will best fit their institutional context as the landscape changes. And lastly, the sense of social responsibility is critical. If libraries are to be trusted repositories of data and knowledge, curators should be compelled to think about how this information can serve not only specialize academic constituencies, but also a public good. And the historical record depends on it. Thank you. Good morning. My name is Lisa Federer. I'm from UCLA. First off, I'd like to thank ARL for having me. It's a great honor to get to address you today. And I'm going to be talking about a new role that I have at the UCLA library, which is as a research informationist. So let's cover that up. First off, what is an informationist will address what that is all about and what that means. I'll talk a little bit about my path to becoming a research informationist, the role that I take as an informationist working with researchers, core competencies for informationists, and finally considerations for people who might be interested in planning a new informationist program at their institution. And I will mention the caveat that I am a health and life sciences librarian, so my particular focus is, of course, on the sciences, but I think that this topic is really relevant to people working with any kind of research data, particularly in the digital humanities. There's a great need for this kind of assistance as well. So first off, what is an informationist? And I have to say that I will tell you a few ideas about what I have of what an informationist is, but there's not really a clear consensus at this point on a definition of exactly what an informationist is or what that role would be working with researchers. The term was originally coined in 2000 by David Off and Florence in a paper that basically viewed the informationist as a new health science profession. They saw informationists as people who had traditional library training, as well as scientific background, so somebody who was a doctor or a nurse who also went to library school and would work embedded in the clinical setting. But I think it's expanded a lot more since then. So I think there are several aspects of what an informationist really is. First off, this person should be embedded in a clinical or, in my case, a research setting at the location where researchers or whatever patron you're serving is actually doing their work. I think it's important for an informationist to have some subject matter knowledge. Some people would argue that you need to have an advanced degree in a science or whatever field you're going to be liaising to as an informationist. I do not have a science degree, however I've managed perfectly fine and so I argue that you do not necessarily need to have that kind of training, as long as you're able to make yourself aware of trends in the field, keep up with the knowledge in the subject area that you're working with. And finally, an informationist also needs to have what we would think of as more traditional library skills and knowledge. Awareness of how information is organized, information seeking behaviors, how people use information to more effectively work with research teams. So my particular path to becoming an informationist is, I think, sort of non-traditional, although this is sort of a non-traditional role, so I guess there's not really a standard path. I began having somewhat of a science education when I was young. I took a very strong science program when I was an undergrad, although my degree was in English. So I felt that that was very important that I have at least sort of an awareness of science, the language of science, the methodology, how these things work. I went on to get my masters in English and spent six years as an English professor, totally logical for someone who's going to be a science librarian, I'm sure. However, I think this teaching experience was very important for two reasons. One, I do end up doing a lot of teaching in my position, doing instruction to researchers, students, graduate students in particular about how to manage their data, more efficiently in their research. And it's also nice to have that teaching experience because I've sort of been on the other side of being faculty, so I think I have a little bit of an understanding of where the faculty are coming from and the researchers. So after I left teaching, I went to library school, and one of the things that I was very lucky to benefit from was having an excellent curriculum and data training. At UCLA, where I did my library work, we are very fortunate to have Christine Borgman, who is an excellent exemplar of people working in the data field, and I took several classes with her and I think that was absolutely crucial in getting me to where I am today. Once I took on the position of Health and Life Science Librarian at UCLA, I've noticed that there was a big need for this kind of assistance on campus. We have a fantastic research institution, but there's a lot of people doing a lot of work, but they may not have the training in handling data, although they have the training in working in science, so there's a great need on campus for somebody to assist with these kinds of issues. And then probably most crucially support from the administration of my library, from our fantastic University Librarian who we just heard from earlier down to my director of my library. They've all been very supportive of me branching out and taking on these new roles and encouraging me to pursue different opportunities and that of course has been absolutely crucial in allowing me to do all of this. So I want to talk a little bit about roles for informationists. This is certainly not an inclusive list. This is what I think primarily I do in my role as an informationist with my research team, and I guess I should probably back up and talk a little bit about how I came into that position. There was a call for proposals for supplements to existing NIH National Institutes of Health grants, so researchers who were already working with grant funding from NIH could apply for a supplement to have an informationist join their team. So I partnered with a research team, put forward a proposal, and we were lucky enough to be accepted for that. So now I am partly funded as an informationist for this research team in addition to my responsibilities at the library as a liaison librarian. So what I do with them, I think one of the most important things that I do is as a connector for them to get to the information that they need. There's a great deal of services on campus, many things provided by the California Digital Library that we're fortunate enough to have access to that are fantastic resources, but researchers don't know about them. So I see it as very important for me to connect them to the resources that they might need, the people that they might need. There's a lot of focus as Gary Strong mentioned on doing more interdisciplinary work at UCLA. The library is great in providing spaces for that and I think it's also important for librarians to be able to make those connections between these different research groups. We're sort of out on the ground meeting different people knowing what's going on and so we're able to make those connections between people that probably would not have met otherwise. A big role that I play with my research group is as an information organizer. Scientists, of course, are fantastic in doing science, gathering data, but very few of them have actually had formal training in any sort of data management or data curation and frankly I'm sorry to say but I'm appalled when I see how some of them are handling their data. I've been to researchers' offices where they have a shoebox full of flash drives. That's their data. I've seen researchers that have a single notebook that they've been holding on to for 10 years and scribbling in and nobody can understand it but them. There's great data and great science going on on campus but the researchers need a little bit of help in figuring out how they can best manage that data. Particularly now that data sharing has become a buzzword and people are being encouraged to share their data, particularly unique data sets that can't be gathered or replicated it's important that librarians or other information professionals can come and help these researchers to make their data into something that is more useful for them, understandable to other people and basically just make it a better data set. I think we also play an excellent role in being an expert searcher as a medical librarian. I work a lot with doctors who are doing systematic reviews which involve doing very intensive literature searches and most of them come to my office with sort of an idea of what they're looking for but really no idea how to find it and they're amazed when I can just get into these databases and speak the language of the database. So many researchers have an idea of what they would like to find but aren't aware of how to use the tools to find them and frankly they're so busy that they don't really want to take the time to learn to use those tools. So librarians can play a very important role in doing this sort of expert searching. And then finally, what is most exciting for me is that as an informationist I really am part of the research team. I go to the research team meetings with the entire team, the PI, the principal investigator, the postdocs, the graduate students and I sit around the table and I can contribute and that's very exciting for me. I will eventually be listed as a co-author on their papers which is very cool also. My name is on their grant so I've been very lucky to get in with this team that has really embraced me as part of their team and seen the value of what I can offer in terms of information services. So in coming to an informationist role I think there are some additional competencies that one might need beyond what you might think of as traditional library work. So first off, as I mentioned data curation is huge with working with research teams so I think it's very important for an informationist to have a good understanding of the research data lifecycle data practices how people are handling data metadata standards repositories that are available for people to find and deposit their data because I think this is going to be even more important as we move into the age of big data. I also have found that familiarity with scholarly communications and licensing issues is a big deal. A lot of researchers again they're very focused on doing their research and they spend, you know, they want to spend time doing that and not thinking about negotiating copyright or figuring out what they need to do to publish. So this is a way that librarians can help as well. A very important aspect of working as an informationist is having knowledge of grant funders and their policies. Particularly in the sciences with the National Institutes of Health and NSF there are certain requirements that people who get this kind of grant funding have to meet. NIH for example, the researchers are required to deposit their papers that come out of NIH funded research into PubMed Central and open access repository. This has been around since 2008 and I still talk to people that are NIH funded and have never heard of this policy. So it's very important that librarians can assist with that and let people know about those requirements. NSF as well as the National Endowment of Humanities and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation all require data management plans for people who are doing grant proposals. This again, somewhat new requirement and most researchers really don't know exactly what a data management plan would be or what that should contain and so librarians are often able to come and help assist with that. We are especially lucky at the UCLA to have the data management planning tool from the California Digital Library. It is freely available to anyone so if you are working with researchers who need some assistance with this it's a fantastic resource. I think awareness of research practices in the field is important as well. If you're going to engage with researchers it's important to understand the process that they're using. So whether that is a traditional scientific method or if you're working with somebody who's doing digital humanities work and they're using some sort of computational practices it's important to understand the different steps of that process and how the research works. And as I said earlier I don't necessarily think that it's a requirement to have formal education in science or whatever the field is that you're going to be liaising to but I do think it's important to be able to understand at least to some extent the subject matter knowledge. I will admit when I'm in the research team meetings at a certain point like my eyes kind of glaze over when they start talking about voltages of the output of the machine and I don't really know what that means but I know just enough to get by and to understand how they should be working with their data and things that they could be doing a little bit better. And maybe the most important is being somebody that's innovative and willing to take risks. There are several times that I failed in my early attempts at being an informationist but I learned from each of those and I think that ultimately taking those risks is important and it's not always going to work out the first time but you don't want to be stagnant and you want to be able to try some different things. So a few practical considerations that I would suggest if people are interested in starting this kind of program or getting into this kind of work. First off, we talk a lot about big data. This is a buzzword that we hear a lot and this is not, I don't think, where informationists can offer the most help actually. I think it's more important to start with smaller research groups because these are the ones that actually have the most need. Larger research groups I feel are very well funded. Many of them have people that are dedicated to working on these kinds of questions but there's lots of smaller research groups particularly on our campus which is very large and diverse that need some assistance and could greatly benefit from having even a little bit of time with an informationist. It's also crucial to plan for sustainability. I'm the kind person that gets grand ideas and I think this would be great if we could just do this but it's important to consider do we have the resources to offer these services to everybody if they all start knocking at our door. So we started very small at UCLA when we started doing work with data, working with a single team, doing pilot projects. I have this one grant that I'm working on and I think that's manageable at this point. I would eventually like to see us expand our services so we could do work with more research teams on campus because I think we have a lot to offer but it's important that we have the staff in place and the workflows in order to ensure that this is going to be a sustainable service we can offer them. Outreach I think is absolutely key. I think that one of the most important parts of my job is getting out and actually talking to researchers, telling them about what the library and what informationists can do. Whenever I sit down and talk to a researcher or a faculty member at some point in the conversation they always say I had no idea librarians could do that. And I think there is a lot of I guess misunderstanding about what exactly the library's role is and the kind of expertise and training that librarians have. So I think it's crucial that we get out there and actually talk about the knowledge that we do have in the ways that we can help. And finally again I would just like to say that I think it's important to allow and encourage innovation and risk taking. Not all efforts will be successful the first time around but you can't win if you don't try. So that wraps it up. I think we'll be taking questions. So we've had two really interesting presentations on two types of new roles that are being taken on by colleagues working in research libraries. I think we're going to just take a break and see if you have any questions for either of these individuals. I think you're absolutely right in touching on how important it is to build trust in these relationships with the content creators, especially because of this power dynamic of us being really large university working with these smaller organizations with not a lot of resources. And I think this model that we use really speaks to it's been one of our tools in building that trust and we see our partnerships as two collaborations and we always go to our partners first and be like what do you need and how can we do that for you. So instead of us being the experts and telling them what to do, we really try to find out what their needs are and figure out what tools we have available to us to make that possible. And a lot of times it's taking really small steps. When we first started working with the Kigali Genocide Memorial they really liked the idea of having but then they realized that does pose a risk to the people that are in their documentation. And so how we started off was we put a site online but it was password protected and it was only available to people at the center just so they could get a feel of what that would look like maybe on a bigger scale and once we could show them what we could do they started getting excited for the possibilities and started asking well what about this maybe we can do this and so it really was a dialogue between the two of us and not just sort of this top down prescription for what their needs were. As a matter of fact there are several programs that are doing this kind of training. We do have a postdoc fellow at UCLA who is sponsored by Clear and the Sloan Foundation. Her PhD is I think in molecular biology and she's working with us on data curation so she's getting against some of that training and absolutely I think that is certainly a great way to go about it. There are I think many researchers who are interested in gaining this kind of knowledge and that would be a fantastic place to start with getting them some of the skills that they would need to work on these kinds of issues. I think that is definitely one of the biggest challenges that I have in doing this is letting people know about the services we offer so I have been very aggressive in doing outreach. I am a somewhat new librarian at UCLA. I've been there just a little over a year so I kind of had the advantage of when I came in I could say hey I'm your new librarian let me come meet you come to your faculty meeting and that was a good opportunity to get my foot in the door and let people know about some of the things that we could offer but there are also several groups on campus that I found to be very helpful in making relationships with the Office of Contracts and Grants Administration does a lot of work with researchers and so letting them know about some of the services we offer has been a great way to get that out to the researchers for example they sent an email out each week about funding opportunities that are available on campus so I asked them can we get a link to the library on this email and they put it on there and so now that goes out every time an email goes out there is a group of research administrators that meets monthly and on occasion the library will go or librarians will go and present some of the things we have like we went last year and talked about the DMP tool that I mentioned and we will probably be going back again to talk about a new service called Data Up which is a plugin for Excel that facilitates data curation and data upload so finding some of those groups that have access to the researchers but are not the researchers themselves is I think often a great way of going about getting to those people Before we make the transition to part B I have one question for both of you people who take on new roles are out in front of others in assuming that new suite of responsibilities and I am interested in your sense of community are you embraced do you feel a sense of being embraced within the library community or are you shunned if you will in the library community because you are too part of other communities so I would be interested if you reflect on where do you feel yourself fitting in or can you just sort of magically embrace multiple communities well our library is very supportive of the human rights project and I work in the Latin American studies collection that has a huge focus in human rights and so they are very interested in working closely with the human rights documentation initiative it's also really great working with faculty because they see the potential of libraries, librarians and archivists and they are like wow I didn't know libraries could be repositories for such important information or be doing such community work so I definitely feel that this particular new role within the context of human rights has been embraced broadly in the professional community I mean as I mentioned I am trained as an archivist so I am part of the usual association society of American archivist and I have to say it doesn't it doesn't feel like exactly the right fit because a lot of the issues that I am dealing with around digital preservation aren't being addressed in a way that I need it to be because I am looking at such huge amounts of data that no one is really tackling that because it requires so much resources so I am still looking for more of a niche within the information profession so I am open to suggestions Yeah I would echo that I think at UCLA the librarians in general tend to be very interested in hearing more about data you know being a recent library school graduate I have the advantage of having been trained recently and having gotten this information but people that have been out of library school a little while don't necessarily have that expertise but have an interest so we have been able to create some interest in that on campus put together some programs outside of UCLA I think they are sort of a burgeoning community of informationists as part of the Medical Library Association it is a fantastic group to be part of and I really appreciate the community that comes out of that and I am kind of wanting for something that you know would have the same kind of community feel for informationists the NIH grant that I got there were seven grants given out around the country and I think that that might actually be a start for building some community we are getting together the group of all seven recipients and meeting at the beginning of November and going to be kind of talking then and I think that we might develop a community out of that that might extend beyond this initial group so I am hoping fingers crossed thank you very much Lisa and TK those were great presentations so we are blessed today to have two very distinguished leaders from the School of Information community we have asked them to address in their remarks several questions what is this thing called iSchools where did it come from I think we have a sense of that but I think having their insights will be helpful how are they developing their programs in innovative ways not only to branch out into new areas of curriculum development and research but how are they seeing themselves supporting the new roles that we are discussing here at this forum and what are some of the workforce issues that they are dealing with and so we have two outstanding individuals the first speaker will be Liz Liddy she is dean and trustee professor in the School of Information Studies at Syracuse in 1999 she was appointed director of the school center for natural language processing and she also is an adjunct professor at the upstate medical university where she conducts research on medical informatics I think it is important if she will allow me to highlight the fact that given that breadth of very interesting information research she has a bachelor's degree a master's degree in information studies and PhD from Syracuse so it is very interesting to me at least to see these individuals coming out of what we might characterize as the traditional venues through which librarians have channeled into the profession but individuals who are really developing a new outreach and capacity and vision for what their training and backgrounds will allow them to do and I think our deans of information schools are exemplars of that so the second speaker will be Ron Larson he is professor and dean of the School of Information Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh he has been very active with leading studies for the National Science Foundation and if you track back through his career you find 17 years at NASA you find 17 years in various IT and other academic planning roles at the University of Maryland an important role with the Information Technology Office at DARPA this is a person who has played a very influential and important role across national developments in IT higher education developments in IT and is now playing out that expertise and experience to help us advance the information sciences and information studies programs so two really really wonderful people so I'll turn it over to Liz and then Ron will come up and speak as well I'm very glad to be here I've enjoyed the presentations and the conversations I've had with many of you actually the first time I've been to one of these so thank you for making me feel welcome I'm going to start a little bit by telling you about iSchools I think sometimes we presume those of us who are active in the iSchools presume that everyone knows who they are what they are, where they came from so let me just tell you what I call a 60 second history so probably surprised to hear that we began as a gang back in the late 80's what was called the gang of three three of the deans from Drexel, Pitt and Syracuse who had already changed the names of their school from library science to information science gathered together and took on the task of let's spread and share what we now perceive as the increased importance of information over and above what has already been done and we will continue to do in library science so it went in fits and starts until about 2005 when they decided they were no longer going to call themselves a gang there were ten of them and what they became was the iSchool caucus so that was in 2005 the goal being to advance the information field in the 21st century now when you flip forward to today as chair of the iSchool organization I'm very proud to say that we now have 38 iSchools in 11 countries and on four continents so I hope this shows up some you can get a sense of where these iSchools are preponderance of them are in North America where we started a good number now are in western Europe and four are in Asia we're seeing a great deal of growth outside of the US right now there's several in Australia and in the moment we're in conversations with two universities in Africa who are interested in becoming iSchools and one from South America so this is the list of the iSchools not quite sure how clear it is for you to see but it's on our website it's easy for you to find the iSchool website be patient in about two weeks there's going to be a brand new version up but you can find see the names of the universities around the world which do have iSchools what's interesting I think to take a look at is there's a lot of commonality and variety both in the school names and in what is covered and taught within the iSchool it's frequently a bit of a challenge for both students who are looking to go to an iSchool to compare and see there is differences for them then to find the place so there's 16 different names that the iSchools the 38 of them use one of these names I think you can see the preponderance of information here many of the original iSchools came from library science what we're seeing more recently the schools that are becoming iSchools lots of their origins are from computer science and so we have a very very nice meld going on what's probably more informative is if you look at this wordle of the names of the iSchool graduate programs so most of the iSchools have more than one graduate program and you can see obviously here what are the more popular based on size names across all of these iSchool graduate programs but however no matter their origin or their specific focus the iSchools in essence what you wouldn't be surprised about is the intersection of information technology and people which requires a very broad interdisciplinary approach to the phenomena and the relationships amongst these three and in most instances iSchool students will graduate with depth in a particular domain or a specific skill set and so one of the goals of us sharing information about the iSchools with you here today is for you to realize that there probably is a wealth of talent that you might be interested in hiring for your various academic research libraries the live we always consider the graduates is working within a community and that community varies dramatically where these students go it might be a community organization a social service agency a technical startup company a pharmaceutical research lab a multinational finance corporation or an academic research library and those are all places where they do go many of the skills are the same some are special for that environment but there's always a community within which they will contribute their information technology and people skills so my belief is and what I've heard from the last two days here is what academic research libraries are really doing today in the two examples you heard just a few minutes ago and what we'll be doing in the future really demand the skills and expertise that other informational professionals require of our students as well so while it might be a bit of an anathema but after the two days I don't think it's quite such an anathema to you I believe that you as leaders of research libraries will be hiring not just our MLIS graduates but our information management technology graduates and our telecom and network management grads very proud to say Tito Sierra who you heard yesterday is a graduate of the iSchool at Syracuse but not out of the library science program Tito was a graduate of the masters in information management and this I think you're going to see more and more of this because a student who has a masters in information management from a school where an MLIS program is also taught with lots of cross-registration of students across programs many of them will in many instances be equally well prepared for the positions you have as someone who graduates with simply an MLIS degree I think we're already seeing it and it will become increasingly recognized as we move into a future where information no matter where it originates no matter where it now lives no matter how it is used will require many of the same skills and expertise so I believe and I know Ron does as well that the iSchools are perfectly poised to provide an excellent workforce for academic research libraries I mean your mission is to enable scholarly research to be conducted vis-a-vis your in-depth collections as well as the ability and this I like to stress to participate in the full life cycle of information or as I will as I will always be calling it now data so this is what my vision is take the library skills plus knowledge of data science I think we've got a new profession here data science librarian I looked at the list of titles that Tito shared yesterday of people looking for positions I didn't see this but there's some that are I think semantically very very similar and while iSchool MLIS students learn the more library science skills of data curation, collection, management and preservation they also learn how to deal with the entire life cycle of data there's multiple perspectives on the data life cycle one perspective this is the more curation perspective when I think the field was referred to more as e-science versus data science and this focuses on things such logging, archiving, preservation while the second perspective which is the one that I'm a big proponent of is the full life cycle which includes a fuller range of the knowledge and skills that are now being taught in the iSchools such as data analytics and data visualizations which are these are very important of the people who are coming to hire the students who are taking our data science certificate of advanced study visualization it is these analytic capabilities that are becoming more and more in demand and so we know that all of the stages are important but the reason I think these stages of analytics and representation and visualization are key because these stages there's looping back and forth and it's hard to say well I'm okay with three of them I don't know the other two because one of those third ones one of the earlier ones so we see in the iSchools see these competencies as needed for our graduates to contribute to the optimal uses of all the rich data resources that are now available whether these are purely numeric resources that reside in corporate financial data repositories or across all the research data that are produced by universities many many diverse research projects and this can be purely quantitative numeric data or the more textual qualitative research data produced by social science and humanities researchers now the fact that the commercial world I'm sure you've heard I've heard many times big data mentioned here the fact that the commercial world has so quickly adopted data informed decision making has changed what was originally as I said referred to as eScience when it was more of an archival view on data science to a more active life cycle view where in the range of the analytic uses of the curated data influences the competencies so MLIS graduates who have also earned a CAS in data science really have the best of both worlds to offer to academic research libraries excuse me I need a drink so now obviously the school I'm most familiar with I'm talking for all the iSchools what I'm saying is not just particular to mine but I'm going to give you a few details from my iSchool because it is the one I'm most familiar with where we do offer is do others a certificate advanced studies which is a 15 credit specialization people take it either while they're getting their masters they can return for it you can earn it in person you can take it fully online which is a lot of what we are seeing and by taking a look at the courses here so these are the courses that the students from when they are getting their data science specialization our MLIS has 19 required courses to meet the ALA requirements but on top if it's a 36 hour masters there's plenty of room then for them to specialize in something such as data science there are three required courses and two electives but they can obviously free to take more than that I think they'll have the basis when they graduate with the MLIS plus the CAS they have the basic library skills and in addition to that they have the more technical skills such as database development statistics data mining and systems administration but I think what's really important above all and I heard it in the last two presentations they'll have the library perspective in addition to that so this includes theoretical skills such as knowing what constitutes data quality and the softer skills such as understanding the social aspects of information and how to serve as an intermediary between the domain experts and the data now here's some examples of positions that are the graduate some of the graduates from our MLIS plus data science have gone into again you can see the great variety of titles similar to what Tito was sharing with us yesterday you can tell this is a newer area they haven't quite settled on what these positions will be called but as you can see the four of these are from university or university libraries some of you may be from these universities but you'll notice that the fourth one is from the corporate world and that's what I think the challenge is going to be for the academic research libraries is because the corporate world is really out looking to hire these students so amongst many other roles that the iSchool as a consortium really see we see ourselves preparing future data science librarians for more places such as Johns Hopkins University which was the first one I really heard about who had taken this leadership role they're taking leadership responsibility on their campuses for the whole university's data needs where iSchool trained data science librarians were able to provide a state of the art research data repository as well as the accompanying services so this is very much the vision I have for the data science librarian not just my vision a good number of other people this is a burgeoning field but someone who can do can really work between both who has the library skills and expertise as well as the ability to integrate and work with the researchers so when I think of it what might a repository be able to provide to an academic environment these are just some of the skills that and capabilities that are possible that can be contributed by someone with either just the MLIS plus data science or perhaps another one of the masters with a specialization in data science so basically I'm saying that iSchool graduates will perform a much more active role in academic research university wide in the academic research libraries the same as we are seeing in all libraries whether it's community libraries or school libraries the librarian is not just the keeper of the information but someone who teams with the community that they are part of to accomplish their common goals so now I'm just going to touch on one other topic that I think matters to this group in addition to the quantitative stuff that most people think of when they hear data when people hear data they typically think of numeric data but much academic research as you all well know involves non-numeric data also referred to as qualitative data which is typically text or increasingly images in the iSchool there is very active research in understanding and responding to this burgeoning area of qualitative data repositories what we call QDRs which I consider a key opportunity as an area where academic research libraries can bring their expertise and experience and what's interesting is because the field of data science is still relatively new at trying to understand and deal with qualitative data I propose there's a real leadership role here for academic researchers in first defining and then providing this function from data science librarians so from a recent NSF study joint project that was done by academic qualitative researchers and iSchool faculty it appears quite clear that there's a major opportunity here for both of those parties so in a survey 115 qualitative researchers shared their needs their practices and their wishes from this the researchers who were building the QDR learned that the type of digitized data that their repository would likely house includes documents, newspaper articles notes and transcripts of interviews and focus groups, oral histories participant observation and ethnographic studies as well as audio and video from the same all of which to you folks as academic research librarians must sound very familiar in things you're experienced with the other thing is of interest as well 64% of the researchers report they have never shared their own qualitative with other scholars they all agreed that a dedicated repository for qualitative data as well as the guidance and training that they need in data preparation support in the analytics and management would be highly desirable and if it had been available they would have shared their data so I propose that iSchool graduates and experienced academic research libraries work to have such a qualitative data repository recognized as being within the purview of the university library as funders demands for data sharing will continue to escalate they're only going to continue to escalate all researchers are looking for advice and training and these request I think match the core skills so now looking beyond I'm going to look for just one final slide look beyond what graduates can contribute and ask you to consider the benefits that academic research libraries can bring both to the research community within their university to the university itself in bottom line to the academic research library so this would be the ability to advance research I mean many organizations that have provided data to multiple teams where they have learned that when the data is shared advancement in the field is much quicker than when there is no sharing of data and now we're all required to anyway also I think another important thing is they said they don't use it for teaching 82% of the survey said they would be able to use the data for teaching which would be wonderful much more hands on real world opportunities for the students to learn so let me just you know conclude my vision of the academic research libraries role I think that I think that what we will see the future in which all the research that's being done at universities whether it's qualitative or quantitative will have all of its data appropriately organized represented stored accessed analyzed and visualized by and within the university library well we've made many positive steps towards this goal and I think what you've been hearing today will confirm that I really would like to see the iSchools and we stand up and offer to team with you with the ARL to work to move towards this future so thank you I think Liz gave us a real nice introduction and orientation and a little bit of a history tour of the iSchool and their development what I want to do in the next few minutes is to drill down a little bit further into that and describe and reflect a little bit on what we've really been discussing the past couple days which is that fundamentally scholarly communication is being transformed by digital technologies and as a result our institutions are being transformed and as a result our profession is being transformed so in order to go into this a little bit further I'd like to conjure up the famous duo the baseball philosopher and folk music musician of Yogi Berra and Bob Dylan and start out with I think we all recognize that in fact the future ain't what it used to be and the times they really are a change in and that's why we are here today is to explore how these times are a change in and what that means to us in our profession by cyber scholarship well over the past ten years there's been a substantial number of studies done reports written even books written I've only highlighted a few of them here but as Liz noted they're making qualitative difference in our research and those qualitative differences are currently rending themselves as things we call big data for example but they are fundamental transformations to how we think about the research process they engage interdisciplinary investigations that engage scientists, technologists and humanities scholars in new kinds of ways that we really haven't seen before and these present some transformative opportunities for us as information professionals and librarians and kind of keeper of the flame so what are these emerging forms of research well data driven clearly but data driven in the sense that it's not just analyzing data it's now being explored using explorative techniques using correlative techniques to really sift through material and find combinations and insights that are hidden there beyond our eyesight these are technology enabled so as Greg Crane used to say in one of our workshops a human can read only one document at a time to analyze millions concurrently and that's the environment in which we are now is being able to analyze millions of distinct data items be they documents or data sets concurrently this is truly transformative it stretches our traditions from the notions of collecting curating preserving physical artifacts to now collecting curating preserving digital artifacts and trying to cope with what that means in terms of developing storing and managing the human record into the future it's clearly been enabled by technology and we see a vast number of experiments in this some of which succeed some of which not so much but we're familiar with a lot of these things they accelerate the change of ideas they expand the fields of contributors that can be engaged in these things and fundamentally and why we are in this room today is they disrupt our lives and we are in a very complicated librarianship so there are challenges to the infrastructure that we have so carefully developed over the past couple hundred years contemporary scholarship we talk about big data we talk about curating and storing and archiving data but it's more than that this Carol Goble has clearly articulated from the University Manchester it's not only about storing digital content it's also about workflows that have been deployed to reach the conclusions that are published ultimately from the analysis of that material and unfortunately we're not very good yet about curating this information when we look across the disciplines we find that most primary data tends to be discarded after publication when it's not rather discarded it's rarely accessible and when it is accessible it's rarely interoperable but we are approaching what I believe is a tipping point here because almost every discipline is now completely engaged in the generation of digital information to communicate their scholarly record and we don't have the infrastructure and the services to adequately support that Peter Murray Rust from the University of Cambridge was one of our workshops a couple years ago and so I like these quotes that he made there and I call them to your attention he's a computational chemist and he says the current scientific literature that which we have in our libraries today were it to be presented in a semantically accessible form contains huge amounts of undiscovered science and then he goes on of course with his analysis of why some of this hasn't happened and I'll leave that to you to consider but the evolution of this type of technology and these approaches to research present both as we all know a range of challenges and a range of opportunities to us as Liz began to describe we are in the process of refining the entire MLIS curriculum around these issues we're trying to get our students to understand that they need to reach beyond the library and if they came to our schools with the idea that they were going to lead oystered lives within the hallowed halls of academia in the back rooms of a research library they're horribly misinformed we need to champion the idea of digital stewardship throughout the academy and engage very actively with those conducting disciplinary research one of the challenges at my school and I think I share this challenge with my colleagues at the other information schools is we typically attract a lot of humanity scholars into our graduate programs we really need more STEM students in there we need more business students in there we need a broad array of disciplines that are not currently represented at the level that they need to be represented we need to be engaging more diversity students as Jorge mentioned yesterday there's a vast array of students that we are not bringing into this profession that we need to be bringing in we need their voices to be heard we need to explore emerging roles for our profession things as a library as a repository and a publisher and I know a number of you are experimenting with those models now and I congratulate you for doing that Liz mentioned that the role of the embedded informationist and we're beginning to explore that even more and Lisa mentioned her role also as an informationist but we need to engage more actively with the disciplines here and in recent conversations we've been exploring even further this notion of a proactive mediation throughout the life cycle of scholarly workflows what do we mean by that we mean historically where our libraries have tended to pick up materials at the end of the process and then catalog them and put them into our collections and when we start thinking about digital data curation we start thinking about capturing data sets at the time of publication and that here the thought is no we need to get engaged at the beginning of the process and we need to have our embedded informationist out in the field working with the teams throughout the entire process to inform and engage them and to develop the resources necessary that will enable us then to retain that scholarly record into the future so we've heard already a number of things about data librarians and data scientists I'd like to suggest that when we get one of our data librarians as a co-PI and a major national grant then that would be a gold star to put up somewhere, it would be a nice signal and as Liz mentioned there's really no dearth of opportunity here but it takes some creativity what if her students put up this blog back in December 2011 it was titled 21 non-librarian jobs for LIS grads so I took a sample of them here, you can scan them over there, particularly Gary, I particularly like the wine librarian one down there you'd appreciate that too but what we try to instill into our graduates the idea that what you will learn at an information school transcends libraries and it transcends the academy and it really opens up a whole array of opportunities for you creatively about where those play out so the emerging roles just I had did with the digital curation center had done some work in trying to flesh out some of the generic roles here so here are the four major ones data creator, data manager, data scientist and data librarian of which data scientist and data librarian really fit extremely well within the notions of information schools and you can see the types of things that are represented for them but now when we start talking about trying to embed our informationists into research teams and work with them throughout the entire process and our job is to curate the human record for future generations we're confronted I think with a fairly serious set of challenges what do we curate what do we save there's a lot of digital stuff out there so I've taken the liberty of making a guess at how we might begin to think hierarchically about these so the data that one can generate again easily simulation data for example it might be computationally extensive to develop it but it can be replicated so I think there's a valid question there's maybe that's less priority less important to save than other things on the other hand as you begin to add value to these things if you're taking sensor data that you only have one chance to capture because that event is only going to happen once that would seem to be more important wouldn't it and if you have data that has substantial human involvement and engagement and value added services associated with it it would seem to me that that would be more important to save so you may or may not agree with the hierarchy I have here but I think it's worth considering as we talk about digital curation and digital stewardship and big data what is it among that information that we as information professionals begin to think about how we discriminate among that and what is important for saving and what is dispensable wrong way so we've tried to do here is there's really an ecology on campuses around research support and maybe we need to start thinking about it more holistically that we're not silos really we are really engaged in a broader holistic enterprise and there's a role that the research library can play which is broader than the one that has had in the past there's a role that IT support services can play and they're slightly different than they've been in the past and our researchers clearly know the research administration folks on campus but perhaps they haven't been engaged in the other problems that we're dealing with now so think about these perhaps more holistically our library certainly can deal with issues of ingest and metadata generation might begin to think about linked open data configurations that support that might think about IP and copyright associated with the intellectual property that's generated by our institutions certainly repository management information literacy and of course preservation and you might have other things that you would throw into that hopper IT support services certainly the hardware stuff the storage aspects of it the communications the computations the migrations from one to the other wouldn't it be nice if we could just kind of put all of the migration services over into IT support forget about the that aspect of digital preservation it's not going to happen but we can partner with them on it and then research administration of course from the patents through the policy and funding and conflict of interest but researchers need to draw on all three of those organizations and we need to collaboratively work together to make that a seamless experience so workforce issues research libraries have traditionally retained the high ground here saying the question for us and the challenge for us is how do we sustain the retention of the high ground and I think that's what meetings like this are really effective at teasing out we clearly need to sustain our linkage to our institution we do that by creating new creative value added services to support our academic community and the scholars among us we need to learn how to support these disciplinary research teams by getting out into the field with them and of course assuring the stewardship of the scholarly record as it gets transformed into new and interesting kinds of ways but doing so sustains the mission that research libraries have long held of connecting researchers together across time, across eras and across space this involves increasingly capturing data at its source curating it processing that and continuing our mission to make that globally accessible to our patrons now and in the future thank you Ron and Liz questions for our colleagues from the iSchools Nancy Elkington from OCLC Research I'm curious for Ron and Liz you've been conducting research yourselves for the length of a professional career can I ask where your outputs are stored you can certainly ask I'm going to answer that question slightly obliquely but in a contemporary framework now as all of you know institutional repositories like B-Space and Fedora were all the rage a few years ago we invested heavily in the development of the technical infrastructure and left with this question of why isn't anybody using it we have these institutional repositories at our campuses and they're not being filled so in collaboration with Rush Miller the director of our university library system when he was expressing frustration on that he looked at me and said Ron what can you do about it so what are the things I did two years ago and you can imagine how popular it was was to tell faculty that they actually in their annual reports no longer needed to tell me what their publications were or what their scholarly output was I would go to the institutional repository once a year and just pull it out and that turned out to be remarkably effective and that's what my stuff is too actually so we are trying to use the institutional repository and find these administrative ways and encouraging people to use it now the part that that I of course didn't touch on there is my whole talk was around digital scholarship and what we have in there of course is the digital artifacts of the printed record not the data section so we have a long ways to go in that direction as well I'm going to refuse to answer on the ground because we are working towards it I don't think I'm very I'm not proud of where some of it is but we are working towards it other questions yes other actually if I had a data science librarian to help me it'd be in great shape I'll try this first it is amazing you you did hear John Sealy Brown this morning comment on how graduates of the high schools are making a great deal more you know a percentage more money than other graduates and this is very true and corporations are all over this they are sending for us and our CAS they will send whole cohorts of people to take the CAS degree in data science and they are very very eager the minute we have all the students do internships and they all get employment absolutely immediately so I do think it will be a bit of a challenge for the academic research libraries to attract them so many people can take the specialization in data science I think if you as research librarians figure out how to attract those who are in the MLIS plus data science I mean they already had an attraction towards that so I think it's you know what is your message to them and I would only elaborate that a little bit saying the Liz's role is really among the leaders in developing these kind of curricula I feel like we're continually playing catch up in appeals moving extraordinarily rapidly here and working with local industry to figure out what they really need and then how to put the curriculum together that matches that need and by the time you get it together they moved on somewhere else so we're kind of continually playing catch up here but the whole space of right now we're doing an undergraduate specialization in data analytics so it took us about a year to put it together but that looks like it's going to be extraordinarily popular both among students all right the answer to that is it's all over the map there are schools that iSchools that are totally accredited by ALA Michigan is one example there are schools like ours that are partially accredited by ALA so our MLIS program is accredited by ALA but not the information science or telecommunications program and then there are iSchools such as Georgia Tech that aren't accredited by ALA at all and I don't lose me no better than I but I don't believe any of the international schools are accredited through ALA the international ones aren't and it matters as you know to some professions and some professional opportunities for some it doesn't matter at all as Ron said Georgia Tech could care less whether their iSchool was accredited by ALA that's going from a different direction but I believe I think it is true all of the iSchools who have MLIS programs are accredited Brian I started to get up to talk about something else which I'll get to in a second but I just want to respond to the accreditation question one observation number one the Canadian iSchools are ALA accredited so if you want to consider that international and secondly at least in the state of California when UC Berkeley decided ALA accreditation was not something that was interested in pursuing it forced the rest of us to re-evaluate our requirement of an ALA accredited masters and indeed we have done that and now we have language like an accredited masters or equivalent degree and combination of relevant experience blah blah blah which I'm sure the rest of you are familiar with let me see if I can tie together a few things I won't claim I won't lay claim yet Ron to the gold star standard but I think there are at least a couple of us who might be able to lay claim to a silver star so we have five data curation pilots going on at UCSD the data curation components of which as opposed to the storage components are being funded with ICR money overhead funds associated with NSF grants so I feel like we've got our nose in the tent and the administration is now actually in conversation with the National Science Foundation we have a new chancellor they have a new director, they know each other they're having convos about line item charges for data curation related activities we're using the funds to employ three FTE none of whom are called data librarians much less informationists and in fact they have instead titles that mostly have the word archivist in them or librarian in them so we have two data curators one of whom is a trained archivist one of whom is an MLS computing expert we have two domain specialists one of whom has a PhD in chemistry and an MLS another of whom has an advanced degree in engineering and an MLS and then we have one meta data specifications analyst who is a trained archivist and what that suggests to me is that at least for the next little while there's going to be a sort of disaggregated bringing together of skills that are going to amount to I think in virtual terms what you're talking about when you talk about data librarians and I think maybe what Lisa is as she talks to us about being an informationist I was interested in your comments Lisa that even though your title is informationist and I know the medical librarianship is all into that as you talked about what core skill sets and what are the characters you kept using the word librarian and I kept thinking she sounds like a librarian which is indeed what she is I was tweeting while TK couldn't tweet and made the comment or quoted your comment about curation essentially being an archival activity boy did I get a lot of responses to that observation which was kind of interesting I'll share the stream with you later with some people saying oh no no no on the contrary it's not an archival activity at all it's a dissemination activity of course I responded by saying in what sense is archival activity not include dissemination but okay so clearly there's a lot of kind of diverse threads that are coming together which may or may not result in high schools actually producing somebody eventually called a data librarian I'm not really sure whether that's true I know I need from you all somebody with a certain set of skills whether they're called a data librarian is much less interesting to me unless and I suspect this may be the case when it comes to informationists unless we're trying to leverage the language to our rhetorical advantage right if we're trying to affect cultural change which may very well be the case by using words like informationist or data librarian well then so be it but there is a sense in which fundamentally I'm not sure I'm seeing an awful lot different which is why when TK said at the very beginning of her presentation you know I'm not sure that what I do is really new and I think I agree with it we'll assume there was not a question there because I we have to get that's right I hug Brian so we have two more questions and then we're going to end there definitely and why I'm a big proponent of the full life cycle not just the curation preservation side of it we're trying to graduate students who can work in any environment and as you say you know the focus on the analyzing and the visualization is what is really key to many of the non-library opportunities for these students I mean our data visualization course is now one of the most popular courses and it's from everybody think of what you're doing with social media I mean if you can get all of those take your tweets that you're sharing and you know do the sentiment which way the debates were going there's just so much there and you can't get your head around too much data if you don't have a way to analyze it so not everyone will take the visualization inside of it but there are a good number of people who are very intrigued and it is one of the high demand areas Ron I was trying to reflect a little bit on your comments on collaboration there's a level at which I am right with you and at the same time a tape started playing in my head but with a couple of our faculty members a couple years ago I was on a I had a big initiative going to try to encourage interdisciplinary collaboration amongst our faculty and with faculty across campus and was investing money in doing this and I developed a heightened respect for how hard that really is and this came to a point when a faculty member came into my office and I had been offering up money essentially to foster these kinds of activities and he said I don't need your money what I'm discovering is that for me to have a collaboration with let's say a colleague across campus I need to invest time in understanding what that person does or what that discipline is I need to read dozens of articles of this discipline and that takes a long time so I was fascinated by John C. Brown's comment this morning you go to a conference and hang out one day and I shouldn't hang out another day by the coffee pot and kind of short circuit the process but I think we have a lot to learn about how to really build these collaborative teams but we are in the thick of it in this discipline and we'll have one final question Elliot you're very close to another speech I give on campus which is when people start this is the one you could probably give it yourselves this is the one where people say their role in mission is changing and I'm saying no it's not but it is and it is exactly in these worlds I've seen we're trying to possible yes I've never had anyone tell me I had to be more cool so thank you final comment I would also just add to that I think part of the issue that we need to address is not just being bold in the library but also dealing with some of the cultural disincentives that there are for particularly for scientists in terms of sharing their data we can build systems all day they're not going to use it if we don't figure out ways to incentivize them to do so before I invite Wendy Leje the current president of the association of research libraries to provide some closing remarks and oversight I ask you to thank me thank this great panel thank you for listening music was provided by Josh Woodward for more talks from this meeting please visit www.arl.org