Data Library - Services Offered By Data Libraries and Data Librarians

Services Offered By Data Libraries and Data Librarians

Library service providing support at the institutional level for the use of numerical and other types of datasets in research. Amongst the support activities typically available:

• Reference Assistance — locating numeric or geospatial datasets containing measurable variables on a particular topic or group of topics, in response to a user query.
• User Instruction — providing hands-on training to groups of users in locating data resources on particular topics, how to download data and read it into spreadsheet, statistical, database, or GIS packages, how to interpret codebooks and other documentation.
• Technical Assistance - including easing registration procedures, troubleshooting problems with the dataset, such as errors in the documentation, reformatting data into something a user can work with, and helping with statistical methodology.
• Collection Development & Management - acquire, maintain, and manage a collection of data files used for secondary analysis by the local user community; purchase institutional data subscriptions; act as a site representative to data providers and national data archives for the institution.
• Preservation and Data Sharing Services - act on a strategy of preservation of datasets in the collection, such as media refreshment and file format migration; download and keep records on updated versions from a central archive. Also, assist users in preparing original data for secondary use by others; either for deposit in a central archive or institutional repository, or for less formal ways of sharing data. This may also involve marking up the data into an appropriate XML standard, such as the Data Documentation Initiative, or adding other metadata to facilitate online discovery.