Data-Intensive Librarians for Data-Intensive Research by Chelcie Rowell.
From the post:
A packed house heard Tony Hey and Clifford Lynch present on The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Research, Digital Scholarship and Implications for Libraries at the 2012 ALA Annual Conference.
Jim Gray coined The Fourth Paradigm in 2007 to reflect a movement toward data-intensive science. Adapting to this change would, Gray noted, require an infrastructure to support the dissemination of both published work and underlying research data. But the return on investment for building the infrastructure would be to accelerate the transformation of raw data to recombined data to knowledge.
In outlining the current research landscape, Hey and Lynch underscored how right Gray was.
Hey led the audience on a whirlwind tour of how scientific research is practiced in the Fourth Paradigm. He showcased several projects that manage data from capture to curation to analysis and long-term preservation. One example he mentioned was the Dataverse Network Project that is working to preserve diverse scholarly outputs from published work to data, images and software.
Lynch reflected on the changing nature of the scientific record and the different collaborative structures that will be needed to define, generate and preserve that record. He noted that we tend to think of the scholarly record in terms of published works. In light of data-intensive science, Lynch said the definition must be expanded to include the datasets which underlie results and the software required to render data.
I wasn’t able to find a video of the presentations and/or slides but while you wait for those to appear, you can consult the homepages of Lynch and Hey for related materials.
Librarians already have searching and bibliographic skills, which are appropriate to the Fourth Paradigm.
What if they were to add big data design, if not processing, skills to their resumes?
What if articles in professional journals carried a byline in addition to the authors: Librarian(s): ?
