RaD Librarians

In February, librarians at the University of Massachusetts Medical School’s Lamar Soutter Library announced the publication of the inaugural issue of the Journal of eScience Librarianship (JESLIB). The open access journal will be published entirely online, with three issues coming out each year – you can read more about JESLIB’s mission and scope here. The journal establishes a platform for scholarly literature pertaining to eScience activities in libraries. Librarians working in and around Massachusetts are heavily represented in JESLIB’s first issue, and about half of the articles are authored or co-authored by UMass faculty. But the journal has a clear and inviting article submission policy, which will hopefully spawn discourse between librarians at different institutions who are trying to provide similar services.

We always find it useful when large-circulation journals like Science or Nature tackle the data issue, especially when they devote a special issue to this topic.  They typically take a structured approach, providing a brief, understandable overview to the topic at hand, and then specific examples or case studies as illustration.

Science’s special issue, on Data Replication and Reproducibility (December 2, 2011) was the latest in our list of “make note of these helpful special issues”.  True to form, the Introduction laid out the issues, noting how “replication — the confirmation of results and conclusions from one study obtained independently in another — is considered the scientific gold standard”, but acknowledging that this concept is complicated by the amounts of data produced, the approaches taken to research, and the complexity of the question.

The first article, by Roger D. Peng from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health on reproducible research in computational science, raised many interesting points about the potential for reproducibility as a minimum standard for assessing the value of scientific claims.  While full replication of a study is the gold standard for evaluating publishing findings, it is often not feasible.  He uses the example of environmental epidemiology to illustrate: reproducing a large cohort study designed to examine health effects of pollution would be difficult if not impossible.  Such a study is very expensive and requires a long follow-up time.

Other reproducibility barriers exist, as he notes, related to technical issues with instrumentation, cultural issues within the researcher community, and the lack of an integrated infrastructure for distributing research results.  But progress is being made, through journals like Biostatistics that encourage authors to make their work reproducible by others.  Peng suggests small steps can be made now to reach the overall goal of reproducibility.  Authors can publish their code, even if it is not “clean or beautiful”.  Free repositories exist for this purpose.  Publishing code plus data sets is another step.  His final recommendation is that the science community create a “DataMed Central” and a “CodeMed Central”, similar to PubMed Central, that is, a repository for data, metadata, and code, with links to each other and corresponding publications.

What do you think of a resource like a “DataMed Central”?

It’s common to want to know what’s going on at other health sciences libraries, especially in emerging areas like e-science.  We had this question after working with Claude Moore Health Sciences librarians to host an e-science bootcamp educational program in March 2011.  Librarians at the event were at different stages in supporting e-science at their institutions.  Was this true of other health sciences librarians across the board?  What did this landscape look like?

We discussed methods for investigating these issues: should we embark on a benchmarking initiative?  Interview colleagues?  Perform a survey?  In the end, we decided on the latter, influenced, no doubt, by the opportunity to re-use questions from the Association for Research Libraries’ (ARL) well-designed survey on e-science and data support services in research libraries from August 2010.

We adapted ARL’s survey to create our own, adding questions specific to health sciences libraries.  It was sent to AAHSL members in September 2011.

Though the response rate was modest (27 responses), the information we gathered was interesting and useful.  Many libraries’ institutions were addressing e-science and data support issues along with campus stakeholders, namely information technology units.  Libraries were using their existing librarians and staff to develop and provide e-science services.  Many had supported training opportunities such as conferences and workshops for their staff to develop their skills.  Libraries were investigating technologies surrounding e-science initiatives and data, and were exploring how to support data management efforts at their institutions.

Interested in our complete findings?  See the full report.

Has your library identified e-science and data support as a priority?

Like many of you, at our academic health sciences library we’re seeking new ways to serve our patrons, including our researchers.  To do this we need to be more aware and involved in the realm of e-Science, commonly described as how research has been affected by large-scale computing.  However, we often find ourselves extending this definition – to include other emerging services (perhaps sometimes describe as Research 2.0).

The ARL/DLF E-Science Institute (April 2011) provided a broader interpretation for e-science, to include “all aspects and types of research that are performed digitally, such as data production and curation, social interaction, publishing and scholarly communication, and the use of physical space for specialized group activities”.  

What do you think of this definition?  We agree that this seems to give a better context for library involvement as a whole.  Libraries have made strides in many of these areas already and will continue to have impact as they develop and refine services.  Our survey of academic health sciences libraries’ e-Science activities also seems to reflect that libraries are interpreting “e-Science” in many different ways.  Makes sense in that many of us provide resources and services to reflect efforts specific to our campus communities, and these also vary. 

You’ll notice that we named this blog RaD Librarians not E-Science librarians.  That decision was based on the fact that “research and data” seems to give us a broader context for describing our services (and perhaps avoids a bit of jargon).  But we admit we’ve yet to really talk to many patrons about how they define these terms and what they mean to them.  An important next step!

Just a few thoughts on how we’re defining e-Science — no doubt we will have this conversation again.  Oh, and more survey details soon — Bart Ragon and I are compiling results and will share with the library community.

Welcome aboard!  We’ve created this blog a place for health sciences librarians involved with Research and Data issues (RaD, get it?) We want to provide a forum where we can learn about and discuss issues, resources, and tools related to supporting e-science, data management, researcher networks, and more.

“We” are staff at the Claude Moore Health Sciences Library, including Andrea Horne, Pete Nagraj, and Bart Ragon. We’re directing this blog to health sciences libraries issues, thinking that it’s best to start with what we know best. But frankly, this is new territory for us, so we hope that you’ll join us on our journey to explore what issues face today’s researchers and how we can best support them.

Thanks for joining us!