Recipe for a Locally Grown Library Data Service: International Ingredients served with Homemade Goodness!!

World Bank Open Data, United Nations Development Programme, Gapminder, and like initiatives offer free downloadable data and online visualization tools that not only enhance instructional capacity but present issues and evidence in a manner that helps students gain more insight into the nature of a problem.   As secondary quantitative data and the tools to manipulate them become increasingly readily and freely available so too demand in the academic environment to gather and critically appraise this evidence increases.   The academic library, as primary purveyor of the university’s information resources, should be an obvious point for the university community to seek and access this data.  Since smaller academic libraries usually don’t have the resources to create and staff full data services units, a locally-derived approach that responds to institutional needs and culture is required.  Building from the recommendations, cautions, and information behaviours  derived from thematic analysis of  in-depth, semi-structured interviews with faculty from business, social science, and professional studies, the co-presenters of this seminar, librarian and sociology professor, have determined considerations necessary to develop an innovative responsive data service that meets campus’ needs without over taxing a small library staff. This seminar describes a process of research1 and service design that began with a study of faculty experiences and opinions about accessing and using secondary quantitative data sources for the classroom and ended with a the development of data service model that, although developed for one small university, could be adapted and locally-tweaked by other small,  primarily undergraduate libraries.

Slides: 

Delivering Data.pdf