About

In typical symposium format, this IFLA WLIC 2019 pre-conference satellite meeting investigates the underlying considerations for administering scholarly, scientific and operations data in libraries to assist users in adding value to their data lifecycles. This is done through the sharing of case studies and practical experiences on different types of data work done in libraries.

The insight and intelligence that can be derived from data is investigated from the perspective of both the human agent (the library professional and library user) and that what the artificial agent (the bot and the machine) needs, to be able to infer and learn from data. This includes inter alia:

• the requirement for timely and insightful management information derived from library data generated by the use of online resources and library services;
• the professional issues of data librarianship in transforming library collections into rich sources of scientific data;
• the dependency of machine agents on reputable and curated scholarly data to derive intelligence from it through a process of knowledge engineering, and the role of libraries in making such data findable and available (open, linked and liberated);
• the infrastructures, frameworks and applications on which data gathering, cleaning, analysis and visualization is done;
• the skills required by the information professional to derive insight from data, as well as the skills and techniques needed to use, wrangle and visualize data.

In doing so, libraries enable information agents to study the academic society from a big data perspective through macro analysis; in the process synthesizing knowledge and extracting structures which can lead to the discovery and communication of meaningful new patterns.