Advancing Open Data: Aligning Education with Public Sector Data Challenges

摘要

LIS education has invested heavily in workforce development for data services in research institutions, however little work has been done on open data competencies needed in public libraries and government agencies. The Open Data Literacy (ODL) project is working to prepare students to build infrastructure and to curate and sustain open data resources for the public by advancing data curation and data science curriculum and providing field experiences in collaboration with city and state agencies. To determine the expertise students need to meet workforce demands, we are examining the current data challenges faced by these public sector organizations. Based on the first year of student field experiences, we found that data organization and access, data quality, and data visualization were prominent areas of competency needed across the sites. While these areas are captured to some degree in current frameworks meant to catalog "data expertise" we find that additional competencies are required, in particular the need for developing and following metadata standards, evaluation and use of storage and cloud services, APIs, law and ethics, and public sector and not-for-profit organization knowledge. In future work these emerging areas of data expertise will be prioritized and deepened in our curriculum and better articulated for application in data education more generally.