9. Connecting academia with data literacy: The development of three Data Labs at Copenhagen University Library

Academic libraries have been supporting information literacy within academia for many years but changes in the ways scholars work, the rapid development in technical possibilities and a boom in access to open data, calls for a new set of skills; we could call it data literacy.

Today, a first-year student can harvest many gigabytes of data from social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook with some simple online tools and a researcher have the possibility to work with data visualizations of his or hers work in ways that wasn’t possible just a few years back.

To meet this growing demand of data literacy support in the academic community, Copenhagen University Library has established three Data Labs at the faculty libraries at Humanities, Social Sciences and Natural and Health Sciences. The Data Labs are open platforms for supporting data literacy within studies, research and learning through education and events on digital methods in sciences. Besides that the three labs are designed as dynamic and aesthetically inspiring learning environments to fuel the creativity and launch experimentation leading to scientific innovation.

Why? Because there is a demand for it in the academic community and with its central and open platform the academic library is in a unique position to fill it. We aim to support every aspect of the data work process: from harvesting, to cleaning, to analyzing to visualizing.

In the poster presentation we will present the data services, the skills and organization to support it, the physical lab space and the hardware and software that we use to meet the demand of the community.