Objectives: Research data services are increasingly being offered by health sciences and academic libraries. Librarians may need to upskill in order to provide sufficient services or to build capacity within their institution. This research study measures the current level of data services skills of health sciences and academic librarians. Taking librarian’s current level of skill, this paper then explores the preferred method of professional education in support of librarians providing data services.
Methods: A twenty-two question online survey of Likert-scale questions was circulated. The survey was circulated on listservs (MEDLIB-L, CANMEDLIB, DataLibs, CANLIB-Data) and social media (Twitter, LinkedIn) over a period of two months at the beginning of 2020. Respondents self-assessed their data skills along four overarching categories: general data services, programming languages and software, library instruction, and soft skills. Within each of the four overarching categories are associated skill sets, such as data mining and data curation in the general data services category, and management and leadership within soft skills. Likert-scale questions were also used to measure how important various professional development initiatives were to respondents. Short answer questions were used to gather additional information about the respondent’s self-assessment of data skills and professional development initiatives.
Results: There were 120 responses to the survey. Participants were from Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. There is correlation between percentage of time spent providing data services and higher levels of skill in the two technical categories: general data services, and programming languages/software. Canada and the United States have similar levels of skill in each of the four overarching categories. There is no correlation between number of years spent in the field and higher levels of skill. There is no correlation between any of the four geographic regions and higher levels of skill in any category.
Conclusions: The study results show that the more time librarians spend performing data services, the higher technical data skills they have. Libraries that plan to or currently offer technical data services should consider hiring a dedicated data librarian. Libraries that choose to do this will increase their capacity to provide a higher level of data services to their users. Based on the study results, librarians need training opportunities to improve skills in specific areas. Training should be provided for librarians who provide any level of data services, including workshops or bootcamps, communities of practice, and mentorship with peers.