by Angela Guess
Steve Kolowich of Inside Higher Ed reports that though the need for data-savvy researchers is only going up, the ability of universities to train data scientists is not. He writes, “The ability to work well with data is understood to be an increasingly crucial skill as universities aim to preserve, sort and discover information that emerges from research. But several studies, revealed here at the annual meeting of the Coalition for Networked Information, suggest that higher education has so far fallen short of preparing research faculty and university information workers to handle those tasks.”
Kolowich adds, “An ethnographic study of 23 faculty members, postdoctoral fellows, graduate students and other researchers, conducted by the anthropologists Lori Jahnke and Andrew Asher on behalf of the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), found that none had received formal training in data management — ‘nor do they express satisfaction with their level of expertise,’ according to a summary of the report. ‘Researchers are learning on the job in an ad hoc fashion,’ explained Rachel Frick, director of the Digital Library Federation at CLIR, quoting the report.”
