I think one of the most challenging aspects to being a data librarian is figuring out how to talk to people about what you do and the services that you provide. Metadata, curation, archiving all mean different things to different people, assuming that they are familiar with these terms at all. Even using the word “data” is a dangerous proposition. Researches in the Arts & Humanities may not see themselves as working with data. Librarians may also have questions about what constitutes “data”, given that definitions are often fairly broad.
As a result I find myself doing a lot of translating between different groups of people. In talking with faculty and librarians I will try to get a sense of how they think of research data and how they describe the issues that are relevant to them. In attempting to make connections with the people I interact with I tend to use full definitions first and then introduce particular terms later on. For example, I’ll talk about how critical it is for people to have access to contextual information about research data so that they will be able to understand the work that was done and trust the data, rather than bring up metadata.
Which brings me to the conundrum of the term “data information literacy”.
In writing up the 2011 article on DIL for portal, Michael Fosmire, C.C. Miller, Megan Sapp Nelson and I employed the term “data information literacy” to deliberately distinguish our work from “data literacy” for two reasons.
First, data literacy generally refers to how the data are used or manipulated to produce research outputs as opposed to how the data are managed, shared or curated. These things are certainly related to each other and a number of the DIL Competencies we came up with venture into this territory, but the perspectives and approaches are distinct from each other. We thought that this distinction was an important one to make.
Second, we really wanted to make connections between data librarians and information literacy librarians and to affirm that each had important contributions to make in this area. We saw this as a “big tent” area for librarians where expertise and skill sets from multiple types of librarians would be needed to be successful. Data was (and perhaps still is) a foreign area to many librarians and so couching the work we were doing in something that was much more familiar and accepted made sense.
However, “data information literacy” as a term does not mean anything to people outside of academic libraries. This is not really surprising. “Information literacy” doesn’t really mean much outside of the library community either (with the possible exception of education) and that community has struggled a bit with how to present itself to faculty, students and others. From what little I know about this community there have been and continue to be discussions about changing “information literacy” to other labels such as “information fluency” to describe their work. These discussions highlight the difficulty of finding a term that succinctly encapsulates the work that librarians do in ways that are both meaningful to ourselves and to others.
I recently published an article with Marianne Stowell Bracke about a semester long course we taught to graduate students in the College of Agriculture at Purdue. We used the term “data literacy” to describe our work in the article because the venue we published in reaches beyond the library community, but perhaps more importantly this is how she and I connected with our students and our sponsors. We wrestled with the decision of what term to use in the article, but in the end choose to be authentic to how we discussed our work with our constituencies.
I don’t know that “data information literacy” as a term has really caught on yet with librarians, or if it ever will. And really that’s okay. I still see value in making the distinction between “data literacy” and “data information literacy”, but it’s more important that we connect with our communities in ways that they can understand and relate to. For now, I’m willing to trade shared terminology for forward progress.
For another take on “translating” as a component of Data Librarianship, check out this article by Kirsten Partlo published in IASSIST Quarterly
