Genesis and Advancement of "Big Data" Research in the Context of Library Systems and Services: The Recent Trends

It is a well-known fact today that data in the 21st Century's knowledge society is just like oil or fossil fuel as it was in the 18th Century's industrial society. Data is the new oil or fuel of the digital economy as oil and coal was the main fuel of the industrial society. This paper has presented brief developmental stages about how data became data science. One of the important milestones of this journey is indeed marked by the launching of the Journal of Data Science by Columbia University in the year 2003. The study and research about data science gradually gave birth to the new discipline 'Big Data' in due course of time. This term primarily indicates a huge chunk of dataset usually generated from any research domain, or industry, business, entrepreneurship, Governmental Activities and many more. The Libraries are the most appropriate place and the librarians are the most appropriate executers for working with big data. Libraries always adopt new technologies and one day may perhaps come when libraries will be the major big data handler. This paper analysed the bibliographic details of 1136 research articles retrieved from the Web of Science database on the topic of application of big data analytics to library systems and presented the results. This subject area was started in the year 2012, as indicated by the Web of Science database. Though the concept of Big Data is much older, its interpretation in the context of library systems and services is comparatively new. This subject is, therefore, still in the growing stage, and the exponential growth phase is yet to come. It is interesting to note that the top three paper contributing countries in this subject area are USA, China and India.