The librarian and his new data-related practices and skills

Abstract

The structures that form the scientific foundation have changed due to the increasing use of data by society, which makes it essential to adopt new ways of dealing with the storage, access and preservation of data from scientific research. In this scenario, librarians play a fundamental role in helping scientists in their research. They can offer training in data management, mediation in best practices, and extraction of information from graphical representations. Therefore, the objective of this work is to identify skills and competencies in data to be developed by librarians to mediate information processes, and to verify if visual literacy is one of them. The methodology proposed for this work is qualitative, descriptive, exploratory, and bibliographic in nature, as it surveys the literature and makes use of theoretical material to identify the skills of the contemporary professional. As a result, it reports that experience with metadata, search, preservation, and knowledge management makes librarians able to manage research data and provide training for researchers so that they learn to access, critically interpret, manage, handle, and use data in an ethical manner. Among the skills and competencies surveyed, knowledge regarding data curation, metadata, repositories, collection, description, data literacy training, visualization, reference service, data management policies, and others were identified. It concludes that data librarians need to transform their traditional doing and that their mission needs to be to make data reusable, shareable, and preservable over time. Retraining shows itself as a viable option for information professionals to be prepared to support the new requirements of scientific research, such as data planning, management, curation, and visualization.