Erik Mitchell
Associate University Librarian
University of California, Berkeley
Vicky Steeves
Research Data Management and Reproducibility Librarian
New York University
Jenny Muilenburg
Data Management Librarian
University of Washington
Data Science (DS) poses key organizational challenges for academic institutions. DS is a multidisciplinary field that includes a range of research methodologies and fields of inquiry. DS as a domain is interested in many of the same issues as libraries: data access and curation, reproducibility, the value of ontologies, and open scholarship. At the same time, identifying opportunities to collaborate and deploy unified services can be challenging. The Data Science Environment (DSE) program, co-funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore and Alfred P. Sloan foundations, provides resources to help universities develop collaborations between researchers, develop tools in DS, and create new career paths for data scientists. Working groups within the DSE focus on reproducibility, career paths, education/training, research methods, space issues, and software/tools. This program has introduced new opportunities for libraries to explore how to engage with this community and consider how to bring the expertise in the DS community to bear on library missions and goals. In this panel, program members from each of the three partner universities, University of Washington, New York University and the University of California, Berkeley, consider the research questions of the DSE and the organizational impact of these groups in the University as a whole and for the libraries specifically. The panel will employ a case-study presentation model framed through three lenses: the role of Data Sciences in Information Science, the potential career paths for data scientists in libraries, and the potential amplification of information services (e.g. data curation, institutional repositories, scholarly publishing).
http://bids.berkeley.edu
http://cds.nyu.edu/
http://escience.washington.edu