BEWILDERED LOOK AT I come at this from a weird place, half practitioner half educator... but one thing that’s going on with data literacy on the practitioner side is that practitioners are trying to BE educators, and a lot of what I’m going to say here is going to sound really familiar to folks in the information literacy space, because to some extent we’re retracing their steps. So let’s talk about that.
#@$%!$#%$# EVEN IS If you ask most library practitioners, they immediately go in the direction of data curation. If you ask most researchers, they immediately go to analysis tools and techniques. What we in LIS think of as data mgmt/curation is INVISIBLE to them, that or hopelessly stuck in analogland. And I’ve had the experience of talking to non-LIS people about curation and having them nod their heads right along with me when they are clearly Not Getting It. I recently reviewed a proposal for one of those shiny new Data Analytics programs, and I’m intentionally being vague about the who and when and what here, but a couple of us at SLIS gave them our input about curation-related learning outcomes and topics and things like that, and they said yes, yes, this is wonderful and important... but when the actual program outline came to us, all the curation content was gone. Utterly. Like, NOPLACE. Which, what, I’m not usually this hoarse, I talk very loudly, what is going on here? Why are most faculty educators outside LIS not getting this? I do honestly think part of it is the same old stereotypes about librarians, frankly. It is like some people just cannot hear that librarians have useful things to say about things that are not books.
the answer with these data analytics programs that are springing up like mushrooms all over the place is just copycatting. These data analytics programs are all copying each other, and LIS didn’t get in at the ground floor, so our angle on data literacy is not part of what’s being copied. Which is unfortunate, but I don’t see much we can do about it at this late date. Or is there? Hold that thought.
DOIN IT RONG Another part of the problem is that our focus on taking proper care of things often puts LIS educators/researchers/practitioners, anybody who wants to educate people outside LIS, in a really socially awkward position, the position of saying UR DOIN IT RONG. And look, of course I don’t mean the NCARs and Long-Term Ecological Research types, of course they know what they’re doing, I mean everybody else, and I’m pretty sure the NCAR and LTER types will be the first to tell you that they are a tiny minority among researchers. And everybody else is doin it rong! This is not even a question! There’s plenty of research about this across any number of disciplines, we’ve heard some of it right here at ASIST, never mind the satirical blog posts of which there are MANY and they’re amazing. But researchers and researcher-educators, 99 times out of 100, their own data-management processes are outdated, rooted in analog, and just generally awful. And to get them to let us teach their students, since they’re absolutely not able to do well at that themselves, seems like we have to get them to ADMIT that, and, um, good luck. If you know how to do this, please tell me. So that was the situation that data-literacy advocates were facing round about oh-seven, oh- eight. And being the good educators we are in LIS, we said damn the torpedoes, LET’S TRAIN ALL THE PEOPLES!
that led to what I call the Curriculum Gold Rush. Which, like, IMLS and Mellon were spraying money in all directions to anybody who said they were gonna develop a curriculum or even just a SYLLABUS for data curation. And I have to say, the gold rush made me feel stupid, because when those calls went out I’d already been teaching a semesterlong LIS course for a year or two, and I was all like, wow, grant agencies pay for syllabus construction? Silly me, I thought that was, like, my JOB or something. So if there are any grant people in the room, I’m sorry, but honestly, why can grant agencies not occasionally reward the leveraging of what ALREADY EXISTS? I do not get that. Be that as it may. Between oh-eight and two-thousand-eleven a metric ton of data management curricula, from the syllabus level on up, got released. And some of their developers are in this room, and I apologize to them too, but I have to say, I don’t get the sense these bespoke curricula moved the needle very far, especially outside LIS.
CC-BY-NC-ND And if I had to say why, I would say that these syllabi and curricula were not being designed to solve the foot-in-the-door problem, the problem of researchers accepting that LISfolk have something to teach them and their students. The curricula were very “we know better than you, eat your broccoli” kinds of things, and they were about as tasty and fun as the cough syrup I’ve been on for the last week. And this is a situation that is actually easier for me as an EDUCATOR than for me as a PRACTITIONER, and indeed for most practitioners, right? Because I can meet somebody who’s on the teaching faculty as an apparent equal, which most library staff CANNOT. And so practitioners trying to teach data literacy are stuck with the same problem as their colleagues teaching information literacy -- and yeah, often it’s the same people -- how do you get the teaching faculty to take it seriously and let you actually do it? How do you get your foot in that damn door?
laughing ruefully at myself here, because I stole this slide from an institutional- repository presentation I did back in OH-SIX where I pointed out the emperor had no clothes, and look, it’s been the same way for teaching data literacy courses for me! I used my LIS- educator-fu to get a one-credit weeklong summer class on the books, Data Management Across the Disciplines, and I could not get the enrollment. I tried, I really did. Twice. Didn’t happen. Foot not in door. I do not entirely know how to solve this problem. I only know that it MUST be solved.
the idea that if you can’t lead the horse to water, fill a bucket and take it to the horse. So we get MANTRA and the University of Minnesota’s self-paced course and all these things. And this is the most promising start I think we have -- but it’s JUST a start. LIS researchers, I think if you look, you’ll find that the ultimate impact on researcher practice here is... not great, it’ll be something, but it’s not great, and what’s worse, I also think you’ll find these don’t solve the foot-in-the-door problem, they don’t set up more and deeper contact between researchers and LIS practitioners and educators. So, you know, do that research anyway, okay? Because we have to know. And anyway, I could be wrong, and I’d love it if I were.
irredeemiably bleak note here, I AM trying again, and yes, this is another stolen slide, this time from 2011 or so. What happened is this. Our department chair, Kristin Eschenfelder, was at one of those random meet-and-greets that academia is full of, and she found out that the Department of Engineering Professional Development, which, who even knew that existed, I didn’t, they were putting together a cross-disciplinary set of one-credit courses on various things and they wanted somebody to teach info management, and here we are! I’m teaching for them in the spring and we’ll see how it goes! And it didn’t happen because we planned it -- it was pure lucky serendipity. Which is kind of not what practitioners are told about this, what we expect. And I think it’s a research question! I think if you do the interviews, you’ll find that successes often feel like a bolt of lightning, totally unpredictable, all you can do is put yourself out there and hope.
CC-BY-NC-ND So those are my lingering research questions. How DO we manufacture serendipity to get a foot in the door? I think what we heard from David Minor on Sunday is absolutely right, you have to start with individual partnerships that you can eventually leverage, not least because that’s a much lower bar to let serendipity do its thing, just finding one or a very few people willing to work with you. So that’s where I think we’re at, and I’m last up, so I’ll turn it back over to Michael.
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