Data Literacy perception and practices in the information environment #ECIL2018

The final session this morning that I (Sheila) am liveblogging is Data Literacy perception and practices in the information environment (presented by Jela Steinerova and co-authored with Miriam Ondrisova). They were looking at "what is the typology of research data" and "what is the perception of research data practices by Slovak researchers", and were concerned with the implication for library and information education. Steinerova considered definitions of research data and research data literacy (see photo). Research data practices will be dependent of the context of the researcher and the data. They used the concept of information infrastructure, as that was important for researcher practice. Finally they used the concept of an information environment as a framework (of objects, networks, systems etc.) supporting information use.
Steinerova said that they drew on 2 projects on modelling the information environment of digital scince, and one of information behaviour in the electronic environment. One study was a qualititative study of 19 experts from various disciplines. One of the outputs was a diagram revealing a typology of research data.Some aspects were common, but others specific to particular disciplines. Another study was their contribution to a multinational study of research data management, where there were 257 responses from Slovakia. The findings showed that the researchers had positive attitudes to research data, but concerns about misuse and misinterpretation of research data. Steinerova showed a bar chart comparing whether certain types of data were used and whether they were produced by researchers. In particular, there was more use than production of zipped and online data sets. The largest number of researchers shared data only with researchers in their own team. There were differences between disciplines. The social sciences had most concerns about misinterpretation of data (and the sciences least: overall, the science researchers had least concerns about sharing data.) According to the responses, universities in Bratislava mostly don't have data management plans, or consistent guidelines for metadata etc.

From this, Steinerova concluded that people mostly shared data with their own team and collaborators, and have concerns about misuse and misinterpretation. The research data practice was intuitive and contextualised by the research discipline. In terms of implications for library and information science education, this pointed up the need for courses in Research Data Management, the need for doctoral students to have training in research data management, and the need for education in core data processes, data visualisation etc. Steinerova also emphasised the need to see the data infrastructures as ecosystems, taking into account data use, information behaviour and re-use behaviour. She saw data librarianship as a new role for librarians. At the conclusion of the session Steinerova presented a model of the interactive academic library (see photo) - the bubbles are services from the library.
There were some interesting conversations afterwards about the value of sharing data, but also the need, ethically, to protect research participants, in qualitative research, but also in quantitative research where in fact people might be identifiable by triangulating the data.