Data intelligence in libraries: The actual and artificial perspectives

A pre-conference meeting to the 2019 World Library and Information Congress

For library managers there is a requirement for timely and insightful management information derived from library data generated by the use of online resources and library services. Library professionals need to continuously develop their digital fluency, literacy and data skills to become increasingly more “data savvy”, enabling themselves to be smarter in the use, wrangling, visualization and application of data.

Likewise, from an artificial perspective, machine agents are dependent on good quality data to be capable to infer and learn from it through a process of knowledge engineering. Libraries should leverage opportunities to implement interventions that could facilitate optimal access to reputable scientific data, thereby fostering the knowledge process by making data findable and available to information agents.

The one and a half-day meeting has taken place on 22 and 23 August 2019, and was hosted by the German National Library in Frankfurt am Main. It has been organized by the IFLA Big Data Special Interest Group.

About

Description

The values of privacy, ethics, and equitable access to information are core to libraries, uniquely positioning them to be providers of high-quality data. This meeting aims to investigate the underlying considerations for administering scholarly, scientific and business data in libraries. It does so from two different perspectives:

The actual perspective

From an actual or real-world perspective, the library professional’s ability to derive information and insight from data is of paramount importance. For library managers there is a requirement for timely and insightful management information derived from library data generated by the use of online resources and library services. Library professionals need to continuously develop their digital fluency, literacy and data skills to become increasingly more “data savvy”, enabling themselves to be smarter in the use, wrangling, visualization and application of data.

The artificial perspective

Likewise, from an artificial perspective, machine agents are dependent on good quality data to be capable to infer and learn from it through a process of knowledge engineering. Libraries should leverage opportunities to implement interventions that could facilitate optimal access to reputable scientific data, thereby fostering the knowledge process by making data findable and available to information agents. In doing so libraries enable information agents to study the academic society from a big data perspective through macro analysis; in the process synthesizing knowledge and extracting structures which can lead to the discovery and communication of meaningful new patterns.

Planning and Program Committee

The meeting is organized by the IFLA Big Data Special Interest Group in cooperation with the German National Library.