Data Scientist Training for Librarians

Recent studies suggest that there will be a shortfall in the near future of skilled talent available to help take advantage of big data in organizations. Meanwhile, government initiatives have encouraged the research community to share their data more openly, raising new challenges for researchers. Librarians can assist in this new data driven environment. Data Scientist Training for Librarians is an experimental course being offered by the Harvard Library to train librarians to respond to the growing data needs of their communities. In the course, librarians familiarize themselves with the research data lifecycle, hands-on, using the latest tools for extracting, wrangling, storing, analyzing and visualizing data. By experiencing the research data lifecycle themselves, becoming data savvy and embracing the data science culture, librarians can begin to imagine how their services might be transformed.