Got data?!

From August 11-15, I attended an intensive workshop hosted by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research on providing social science data library services. Beyond being incredibly helpful and thought-provoking, it was also a wonderful place for meeting data librarians from around the world (one Brit and two Canadians were in attendance). Considering the number of data librarians is pretty small (about 300 members in our international organization), it is rare that we get to meet up very often.

Data boot camp, as it is sometimes lovingly referred to, is much like Immersion for instruction librarians (Amy will write about that soon!). In addition to learning specific skills and techniques for finding and using statistics and data, we discussed the types of services we provide and our roles in the library. We also worked with large data sets and practiced subsetting data for pretend patrons. All of these trainings and discussions built up to planning for our service now and in the future. I will be launching our web presence this fall and have much more information to share about data services at UNCG's University Libraries.