Suchergebnisse

As data skills are incorporated into academic curriculum and data becomes more widely available and used in everyday life, many librarians find themselves serving as 'accidental' data librarians in their subject areas. Due to this evolving landscape and growing data need, it is increasingly important for librarians to be familiar with data resources and able to answer secondary data reference questions. To learn more about this area of librarianship, this study uses survey responses from librarians who answer data questions to explore the challenges and frustrations that arise from data reference questions and interactions. Our key findings reveal that frustrations are ever present in data reference regardless of how much experience a librarian has, and many frustrations arise due to factors such as patron expectations, subject-specific and data-related jargon, and data formats and accessibility.

The LibGuides platform is a ubiquitous tool in academic libraries and is commonly used by librarians to compile and share lists of recommended social science numerical data resources with users. This study leverages the machine-accessible nature of the LibGuides platform to collect links to data and statistical resources from over 10,000 LibGuide pages at 123 R1 research institutions. After substantial data cleaning and normalization, an analysis of the most common resources on those guides provides a unique window into the data repositories, libraries, archives, statistical data platforms, and other machine-readable data sources that are most popular on academic library guides. Results show that freely available resources from U.S. government agencies are among the most common to be included on data and statistical resources guides across institutions. Resources requiring paid licenses or memberships for full access, such as Statistical Insight (ProQuest), Social Explorer, and ICPSR are linked to most frequently overall, regardless of the percentage of institutions that include them. Findings also suggest that libraries are more likely to share traditional licensed statistical resources (e.g., Cambridge's Historical Statistics of the United States) and collections of simple charts and graphs (e.g., Statista) than more robust and complex microdata resources (e.g., IPUMS).

The reproducibility of scientific studies has recently come under increased scrutiny in both the popular and scientific press. Studies from various disciplines (e.g., psychology, health sciences) have revealed failures to reproduce and replicate research. This has led to declarations that science is experiencing a "reproducibility crisis" and that this crisis has negative consequences for science, the public, and public policy. Two of the authors have previously published on reproducibility and the services and expertise librarians and libraries offer that make the library community a key part of supporting reproducible research, and we direct you to these articles for more information on this broader topic.