Changing lanes: Moving from academic to public libraries (new job)

August 11, 2018August 18, 2018 / Christian Lauersen / 2 Comments

“How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.”
– Winnie-the-Pooh

After 8 utterly awesome and rewarding years with The Royal Danish Library / Copenhagen University Library it was the time for something new. From September 1st I will take on the position as director of libraries and citizens services in Roskilde Municipality

What?

The Roskilde Libraries are a wonderful library organism with one main library and 5 branch libraries, citizens services, 3 archives, a mobile library (a very very cool and colorful bus) and serves as central library for the region of Zealand and Bornholm (which means providing of materials and coordinating of library and skill development together with the municipalities in the region). All in all around 140 employees are with the libraries and citizens services in Roskilde.

Roskilde Municipality has 85.000 citizens and holds a reputation as a community that prioritize culture highly. There is a long and strong tradition of collaboration between libraries and the other institutions of culture, education, learning and experiences in the community. And then Roskilde is the home of one of my all time fave venues; The annual Roskilde Festival.

As director of libraries and citizens services I will join the leadership group of City, Culture and Environment and it’s expected that you don’t just deal with libraries but also put energy in developing the community in a broader sense which was one of the things I found appealing about the position.

Lots of stuff is going on with the libraries in Roskilde these days, months and years: The main library in Roskilde are gonna get a new main entrance so it will be more integrated with the upcoming ‘Street of Culture‘ which is gonna run parallel with the main downtown street in Roskilde. A new House of Culture for Children which is run by the library will open in the end of August. A totally new branch library is being build in Viby Zealand and a potential new library is on the rise in Jyllinge. Besides that it seems to be an extremely dynamic organization with high degree of performance, collaboration and development.

Why?

I truly believe that in order to continuously grow – both professional but also as person – we need to move ourselves sometimes. At least I do. I’ve been so happy with my carrier with The Royal Danish Library but never imagined that I should be in the organization forever and this was a chance to try something completely new, take a step up the leadership ladder and then it is just an awesome job and a great opportunity.

Also, over years I’ve been advocating about the importance of a higher degree of sector mobility between academic and public libraries (the mobility is close to zero in Denmark). I believe a higher mobility will foster more collaboration between the sectors which would benefit both students, researchers and citizens but also because I think that public and academic libraries can learn so much from each other. By this move I feel that I walk the talk and I will do what I can to promote actual collaboration between public and academic libraries.

I am looking forward to learn about public libraries, citizens services and the community in Roskilde. To advocate the value and importance of public libraries in our societies on national and global level. To meet all the people and try to make Roskilde a better place to live. And to learn more about myself.

Obvious I will keep on blogging about my new library life. Also follow along on Twitter and Instagram for all the new library adventures.

Cheers

Christian

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Yours truly in front of the main library in Roskilde

Beyond tables and chairs: The Library as facilitating platform

April 20, 2018May 1, 2018 / Christian Lauersen / 2 Comments

Text of my talk at the LIBER LAG Conference in Vienna April 18 – 20 2018

Hi all, my name is Christian. I’m with The Royal Danish Library in Copenhagen and is head of Roskilde University Library, Faculty Library of Social Sciences and The Administrative Library. I’m really thrilled to be with you here in Vienna to talk about the library as a place.

I find it a bit ironic that I’m talking in a session called ‘Learning Centers’ when I, well hate is a strong word, but I really have some big issues about the term ‘learning center’ used in library context. To me libraries are very much about learning and about people meeting, collaboration and talking. The library is also about collections for sure but a collection in itself is not the goal, the goal is to support learning, education and research and libraries are great at that so let’s just call it a library.

This is a library architecture conference and I have heard many great talks on library architecture the last couple of days. but I am not gonna talk about library architecture. I am not gonna talk about buildings, refurbishment or where to pick the best tables and chairs. I am not gonna talk about the wonders of having a landmark architectural piece of eye candy of a library building. I am gonna talk about the library as a place for what is has always been about: Learning, education, research and enlightenment and how we can actively empower that through the library as a physical space. I will use our Data Lab at The Faculty Library as a case for this but it is important to say that the idea can be applied in many areas.

What makes a great place? And is a library without books still a library?

But first I like to ask you two questions.

Is a physical library without any physical books or journals still a library? Imagine your library and take away all the books and journals – is it still a library? Is it the books and journals that defines a building as a library. Or is it something else?

[this question gave spark to a lively discussion among the audience most pointing at, that the aim and value of a library building in 2018 were beyond the storage of a physical collection]

In a world that is becoming more and more digital this is not only a rhetorical or philosophical question. It is a crucial question – at least in Copenhagen. And actually also an essential question we should never stop asking ourselves – what is a library and what makes it significant and valuable. I don’t believe that a physical collection defines a library building, it is a big part of our legacy and identity as libraries but the scope and the meaning of the library has always been greater than a book collection.

Next question: What makes a great place? Try to think about a place that you were recently that just made you feel good and comfortable, that made you feel safe and welcome. That is a subjective feeling what defines what one find a great place but I find it really useful, whenever I’m in a place where I really feel good, where I feel that I belong, to think about what it is about that place that make me feel like that. And then I start thinking that about how to take some of that and maybe transfer it into the library space. Chances are that I’m not the only one who feel that way about that place.

[a lady among the audience shared a wonderful story about a pastry café she visited in Vienna the day before were the decor, the smell and the service just made her feel at home]

If we look at the library building historical it has been a place to storage and access information and knowledge bound to physical formats like books and journals. Many libraries don’t need that place for storage and access the same way anymore when our collections are highly digital so do we still need physical libraries? For sure we see students flocking to the library to work and study without using the core library services but does that require a library building? Couldn’t that just be any building on campus? A study hub or a campus learning common? Maybe a so called Learning Center? Personally I think that a library is not only defined by its collection – whether it be a physical or electronic collection. It is a very important part, but our main assignment in my opinion is to support research, education and learning, and it relies on other activities than just the collection. Libraries are a people business, not a book business.

In this talk I will, using Digital Social Science Lab at the Faculty Library of Social Sciences, try to demonstrate that a physical library building without books is still a very relevant library if we are true to the original purpose of a library and how an active facilitating use of the physical library room can create new forms of learning and a sense of belongingness among students. In this case the focus is on creating a platform for sharing knowledge and network within data handling and data analysis, digital methods and social sciences but I believe this way of active utilization of the library space can be applied to many areas.

We don’t have patent on these thoughts. Back in the late 1800s Justin Windsor, the first president of the American Library Association, pointed out that The Library both had to be “…a repository, a collection, but also a workshop, a place where you together could be informed and learn about the world“. I highly agree with Mr. Windsor.

Old white dude with some healthy perspectives on libraries

My context for talking about this is important and might differ from your context: At Copenhagen University Library we use around 10 million US dollars on electronic resources a year and a little over 300.000 US dollars on physical items. At the same time we remove physical collection from open stacks to remote stacks to make the handling of reservations faster and more efficient and to make more room for students in the open libraries. We are only a year or two away from having 100% bookless faculty libraries. We have been forced to ask ourselves what we should do to our open library spaces when the books are not there anymore. There are many answers to that. Digital Social Science Lab is one of the answers.

Case: Digital Social Science Lab

At The Faculty Library of Social Sciences, we opened Digital Social Science Lab on 18th of February 2016 as a reaction to some of the changes we saw around us. And I am not talking about the bookless libraries here. When the world changes, it often affects the institutions and people we serve and when they change, libraries should also take a good look at whether there is something they should change. What we were seeing was students and faculty members turning to other resources than books and journals when they wanted to get insights on the world and carry out studies and research. The started collecting digital data. Students and researchers of higher education has always used data in there work; Collecting rocks, doing interviews, observing human behavior is all collecting data. But we experienced that they also started to deal with other kinds of data; harvesting social media data and use open data sources like Airbnb location or digitalizes maps of Greenland. They also started asking us if we could help them, for instance visualization of data or analyzing of huge amounts of text. So we moved on that and created Digital Social Science Lab to support data literacy in social sciences.

To meet this change and development in higher education we established Digital Social Science Lab. DSSL is a physical space for education and instructions for data handling within social sciences, it’s software and hardware for harvesting, clearing, analyzing and visualizing various kinds of data, it’s a community but most of all it’s a reaction.

In DSSL we have initiated some activities in order to create a bridge between the students and the digital methods. The library teach and do workshops on various software and methods for handling and analyzing data within social sciences – for example Netvizz and TCAT for harvesting data, Open Refine for cleaning, NVivo, SPSS and Excel for analysis and Gephi for visualization. It is a very important part of DSSL, but that is not what is important in this context. What I want to focus on is the facilitating work we put into it our data lab: We are trying to create a platform for people to meet and learn from each other in relation to work with data, we are trying to create a community where the library serves as platform and the librarian as facilitator. Again, this is just context and is not really important to my actually points with this talk.

Digital Social Science Lab is a huge success, we do around 80 events on data wrangling a year and the space has been nominated to the University of Copenhagen’s Yearly Study Environmental Award. I give credit to these 4 things: The facilitation, peer-to-peer learning, belongingness and the space.

How to fail at fostering learning

I’ve seen many attempts at creating new spaces at libraries to facilitate learning; Fab Lab’s, Makers Spaces, Data Labs, Learning Commons. Some were great and some failed and I really love failures, we should embrace failures and learn from them. When we fail we take a room and fill it with some nice furniture and some state-of-the-art hardware and software and stand back, excitingly waiting for people to start learn something. What happens in those cases is that students come with there own lab-tops, sits down and stats working like they have always done.

The most valuable asset of any great library place is the library staff. We need to take ownership of the library space, we need to facilitate learning processes, we need to tell stories about the library and the learning that we want to support. Architects can do the buildings but it is our responsibility as library professionals to provide the content.

So one way we take ownership of the space and the learning we want to support is to facilitate education and events to support data literacy, we are not the experts, we set a scene where people meet and learn together. One of the specific activities we are doing is an event series we call Digital Methods Sessions. It is an event where we invite students in to present their work with digital methods and data management for their fellow students. We typically have three groups of 20 minutes’ duration for the purpose of inspiring there peer students and give insights on other methods than the traditional ones. Digital Methods Sessions is not about learning something hands-on, the purpose is to inspire and create networks and new relationships.

We do one or two session per semester and we simply use our campus network to get students to come and share there ideas: Talk to the students and researchers we know have an interest in digital methods to hear if they know anybody who would be interesting in presenting; make calls in the various Facebook-groups relevant for the faculty etc. The more sessions we do the easier it seems to get students to come and present there work. We always wrap a session up with some snacks and beverages to support the network part of the concept.

Another facilitating activity is Data Sprint’s. A data sprint is a time-limited research and coding workshop where people from different academic and non-academic communities convene physically on a set of data within a curtain topic. The two latest data sprint’s has been on crypto marked and just a month ago a all-day, week-long data sprint on fake news which we co-hosted with TANT-Lab, our sister data lab, from Aalborg University. The data sprint was open for everybody and it was extremely satisfying to see scholars from the different institutions work together with journalists and just regular people walking in from the street. The aim of data sprint’s like these are typical two-fold: 1) to raise awareness on how digital methods can be used on various subjects and a more concrete final result of working with the data. In this case the data sprint contributed to a global Field Guide to Fake News.

The last example on how the facilitating approach in the physical library space can be used is actually not an active move by the library – it’s more of a consequence of the work we do. We discovered that there was a lot of independent Stata workshops (Stata is a program for working statistical data) going on in Digital Social Science Lab. It was simply students who had been meeting each other at various DSSL events and now had started a study group sharing knowledge and collaborating on Stata. We building communities here, ladies and gentlemen. Creating spaces where we can meet, talk and share.

Peer-to-peer learning

Now I’m not a learning expect but I can see that something different is happening when we set the scene with peer-to-peer sessions instead of the regular instructor/expert-to-student setup.

First of all it gives us other opportunities to create different events and learning content than if we where to be the expert/teacher/instructor on every event. I only have a certain amount of library staff, resources and skills and we have no chance to cover the whole spectrum of relevant digital methods and tools. And sometimes a student simply looks different at a certain method or tool than a library worker be course they are more often to use it on tasks in their academic life and not only as an instructor.

Then there is the actually learning situation. What we are doing right now is a pretty traditional learning setup: I know something, I talk and you listen. Not much interaction going on. When we as library professionals teach we represent an institution and they come with some sought of authority. That is totally cool and I think and hope many students see the teaching librarian as someone who really want to make the students succeed which gives the librarian a pretty great role. But it’s different than a student who shares some knowledge and experience on a specific tool or method: The librarian is a professional and the student is a peer and I think that students who learn from other students are more likely to think “hey, if Joe from sociology can do this Gephi data visualization for his paper so can I”.

When we set up our facilitating events we want the participants to be as equal as possible, we want them to collaborate and to work together. We don’t want one person standing at a chalk board being the expert. We want them to talk to each other, learn from each other, challenge each other. Small thing, we always serves a glass of wine and some snacks at the end of our sessions because we want them to stay and talk and network. Peer-to-peer learning seems to be really great at that.

Belonging

I believe the facilitating platform also brings another really important need to the table: A Sense of Belongingness. It is a human need that has a great interest with me. We all need to belong to something; a family, a job, a football team, a nation. If you tell me you don’t need to belong I’ll say you either a psychopath or a liar. Students and researchers at institutions of higher education are no different from that. For many students the study is a huge part of their life and I think it’s crucial for there wellbeing and ability to perform that they feel that they belong. Same go with researchers and teachers. As an open space, not focused on administration or grades, I think the library can help students belong in many ways. The community we have created with DSSL is bridging students with digital tool but it also makes a number of students feel like they belong to something. They will connect with peer students and scholars, they will form study groups, they will help each other, inspire each other, challenge each other. They will feel that they belong. And they will do good. In general I like academic libraries to be more aware of the social role they can play on campus.

Could we do this without a physical room. Maybe digital or just outside the library, somewhere on campus. I don’t think so or at least I’m sure it would not have the same impact. One of the reasons this is working so well is that we are doing in A Library. Sometimes as library professionals we seem to forget it but libraries are one of the most solid and trustworthy brands in the world. Both public and academic libraries are viewed as open spaces for enlightenment, collaboration, knowledge and experiences. A place where everybody is welcome. We make communities smarter (courtesy to library hero Jan Holmquist for the saying) by bringing people together. That is the library in the mind of many people with or without a physical collection. It’s important we remember this when we create and talk about libraries now and in the future.

Also, this is a picture from a regular reading hall at The Faculty Library of Social Sciences and some of you might remember me saying that we didn’t have any books no more. But what is that? Library shelves filled with books. That is true, we still have a great amount of books in the library space but they are all dead books that can’t be found in no catalog or be checked out. They are there because the book might be the single most significant symbol of what we are all about: Enlightenment, knowledge, education, research and learning. Everybody likes to be surrounded by books, it makes you feel good. And also they have a very excellent effect on the acoustics in a room.

Why do they come?

Storytelling and alternatives to the traditional learning setup

Some final notes on working with the actual room. We wanted the room to tell a story, a story about learning, a story about being curious, a story about travelling. So we went hunting for that story and stopped by our neighbor in Copenhagen, The Botanical Garden, the library itself is placed in the old Botanical Laboratory and we thought it was great that we were creating a Data Lab in a Botanical Lab. And it was a kind of magical place, like being in a Wes Anderson movie or something. And it was about things growing and people getting experiences and getting wiser. In a bit of a spooky way but still. So we tapped into that and created a story though the décor.

On practical note we wanted it to an alternative to the traditional learning environment on campus. This is what 90% of the learning spaces on our campus looks like. They are build for one-way communication and not for collaboration. The physical setting of the room is hindering your ability to learn in certain ways. So we made everything on wheels and mobile so we could have a traditional lecture but quickly turn it into a workshop setting.

Digital Social Science Lab two hours before the opening

I hope you all got some inspiration on how to use the library space for community building through a facilitating approach and to return to my opening question, is a Library without books still a library? If you believe that a library is not only defined by it’s collection but by the way it succeed to support learning, education and research then a library without books is still a library. Remember; A Library is not a goal in itself, it’s a mean to contain those very things. When stuff around us changes, like physical books disappearing from the library, let’s take up an active approach to continuously support and create values for our communities.

Libraries are a people business, not a book business

Slides

The Library of today might not fit the reality of tomorrow

December 12, 2016 / Christian Lauersen / Leave a comment

Text of my presentation at the Library Connect webinar “Research data literacy and the library” December 8^th 2016. Other presenters was Sarah Wright from Cornell University and Anita de Waard from Elsevier.

Hi all. Land line phones is like a vintage thing around here so I’m calling in from Copenhagen on a cell phone and I hope you will all be able to hear me clearly. I’m gonna be talking about how Copenhagen University Library is supporting data literacy among students and researchers. We started early 2016 by opening 3 physical data lab in 3 different faculty libraries. In my talk I will mainly focus on one of the data labs, Digital Social Science Lab, at The Faculty Library of Social Sciences.

But first I like to ask and answer the question “Why supporting data literacy at all?”. Basically what we are doing in at Copenhagen University Library is a reaction to some of the changes we have seen in higher education in recent years. I like to give you an example on those changes. When I did my master thesis back in 2007 I did interviews with relevant people to collect information and data on my field of interest; I had recorded the interviews, transcribed them and analyze what was said in them. That was my data and the way of handling it. Today students and researchers has other opportunities to explore the world. In Digital Social Science Lab we recently had a master student presenting how he harvested 2.5 million online articles on the crypto marked, analyzed them with a machine learning method called topic modeling and in the end visualized the huge amount of data in one single slide. There is only 9 years between the two papers but they hold a huge difference in the way scholars work. Both methods are valid today and we are not trying to say, that one way is better than the other – we are simply trying to show students and researcher that there are other opportunities today.

The amount of open data available to use in research and studies has exploded. It’s so massive it’s beyond our imagination. It’s good, it gives us new doors to open in order to explore the world, but to get the keys to those doors, to get a benefit of this development, academia need the tools, methods and skills to master it – otherwise the doors are closed. And that’s what we are trying to support in our data lab’s.

In general, I strongly believe, that when higher education and research are changing, libraries should look at themselves and see if it should take some sought of action – a library of status quo is not a good library – and our 3 data lab’s is a direct reaction to the changes we have seen at our University.

The 3 data lab’s is located at the Faculty Libraries at Humanities, Social Sciences and Natural- and Health Science. They don’t function as isolated islands but as a connected network where we coordinate events, staff training, license agreements and so on.

I will now move on to talk specific about one of the data labs and how it works. Digital Social Science Lab is an open platform for education and events on digital methods. It’s relevant hardware and software for harvesting, cleaning, analyzing and visualizing data and it’s a flexible and dynamic physical learning environment.

One of the key elements in Digital Social Science Lab is events and instructions on different tools and methods for data handling to empower academia with data literacy. The library has its own regular courses but what you see on the slide is a faculty member from sociology who is doing a talk on how he uses network analysis tools on various data sets. So in this case the library is not the expert, we facilitate that data savvy folks meet, talk and learn from each other. I get back to that in a second.

On our own part of training and instructions we are trying to cover the whole workflow of working with data: From harvesting, to cleaning, to analyzing and visualizing data. We try to capture both introduction and advanced level on all tools and we have chosen both very advanced and powerful programs like NVivo which takes time to master, and more intuitive and easy programs like TCAT and Netvizz to make sure people new to data handling, is not scared off. The list of software and programs are dynamic and we add new ones to the list over time.

Besides our own instructional program, we facilitated peer-to-peer sessions in the data lab. We have a series of events called Digital Methods Session where students come and present their work and experiences using digital methods in studies to fellow students. We also do data sprints where people bring datasets and collaborate on analyzing them. We find the facilitating approached really really strong because the library can’t cover everything and because we this way help building a community for data literacy where we bring people together interdisciplinary across the whole university. That’s really valuable for academia; we are not only providing skills, we are also building a network.

We discussed how important the physical space was in the beginning of the process. You could argue that the training could take place anywhere but we ended up using a fair amount of energy and resource on the physical lab. We believe that the physical setup surrounding us highly effects our ability to learn and collaborated. So we decided to build a data lab for people and not for machines – there is only 4 workstations in the lab and that’s actually enough because students bring their own laptop’s and they are often powerful enough to handle the amount of data we work with. Everything is on wheels in the lab and can be moved around to fit different settings for learning. We have worked together with a production designer to create a visual story of the lab and we choose a botanical theme, both because the library is located in the old botanical laboratory but also because botanical researchers has always been really keen on exploring the world and collect and preserve data in form of plants and we thought that story would fit god to a library data lab.

With the physical setup of the data lab we also want to create an alternative to the traditional learning setting on campus. The traditional learning situation in higher education is rows of people who are listening to a lecture. We’re created a dynamic and flexible space where stuff can be moved around to fit different kind of scenarios and that have had a huge attraction on students and faculty members.

An important part of Digital Social Science Lab is the network and community we’re created around the lab. We both have internal and external partners who we collaborate with on events, workshops and sharing of ideas. We want to break down the silos between academic institutions because we think that scholars across intuitions and disciplines can learn a lot from each other.

If I should point to one key to success and impact in this area, it’s coffee. We have used a year of coffee drinking with students, faculty members and management. We have been presenting the basic idea of Digital Social Science Lab and gotten a lot of feedback. With the countless coffee appointments we have both created a solid base of knowledge on how to do this, but also a network and an ownership on the things we have been doing. People wanted to use Digital Social Science Lab before we even opened it.

I thought it might be interesting for you to hear a little about some of the challenges in the process of making Digital Social Science Lab. Two questions we have heard a lot doing the coffee drinking with students and faculty members is:

“Is this really a library task?”

And

“If you do this, is it on the benefit of something else?”

Man people have a fairly traditional idea of what a library is, and they are luckily very happy about the core services of the academic library. But the library of today might not fit the reality of tomorrow, so we need to be a head of the changes that takes place in research and higher education and also be clear about this to the academic community.

Skill development had been going great but had the potential to be some sought of an obstacle. Some of the programs we work with is a bit aside from the regular library tasks and skills, so we have used a fair amount of time looking at the different programs and making skill development plans for each of them. The most important asset of Digital Social Science Lab is not the hardware or software but the people who connects the dots and it’s crucial that they got the right training and skills to carry out the job.

When you do something radical new I think it’s important that you think about how you talk about it to stakeholders and users. So we have used some time developing our story and get answers to “what we are doing” and “why it is important”. That has been really helpful in all the coffee drinking. We have been able to clearly explain what we plan to do and why.

That also has something to do with how the library position itself in the academic environment. We are moving into new land here and it’s been important for us, that no teachers has been thinking “what on earth are the library doing – it’s my job to teach SPSS”

What we’re learned doing the process is, that it’s absolutely not enough just to fill a room with hardware and software for working with data. It takes skills and facilitation from the library to bridge students and researchers with data literacy.

Skill development is crucial to support data literacy and it needs lots of planning and time.

The facilitating role for the library, bringing people together and building a community around data literacy, is a very strong position to take

In that sense network is key. Get on with the coffee drinking.

And then we found that the support of data literacy doesn’t fit all subjects the same way. We had a huge impact with this in Humanities and social Sciences but we are not having the same breakthrough with natural- and health science. That might has something to do with local context but we also find it hard to make a fit and find the right role for the library because the community of natural and health scholars has been working with data for a long time.

That’s it. Thanks for listening.

Some thoughts on The University Library anno 2035

October 20, 2016October 21, 2016 / Christian Lauersen / Leave a comment

You can not escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today
– Abraham Lincoln

A few days ago a got a fun task from a co-worker at Copenhagen University Library; he is the editor of The Faculty Library of Humanities’ newsletter and they where doing a piece on the future of university libraries. He asked if I wanted to contribute with my thoughts and answer the question:

How does the University Library looks like in the year 2035?

Sure! What an excellent and totally mind twisting question. It was really fun and healthy little mind experiment to imagine the University Library in 2035. I think my picture of The University Library 19 years from now might be colored by an inherent optimism on behalf of libraries and the fact, that I wrote down my 2035 scenario in the co-drivers seat en route from Copenhagen to Skaelskoer with a cold Sierra Nevada Torpedo Extra IPA in my hand.

You find my University Library anno 2035 below: The space was limited, the context is Denmark but anyway I think the result is worth a share and I recommend the mind experiment for everyone who cares about the future of libraries (I do also recommend a good beer for this kind of work).

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Thinking big

One University Library, four primary tasks

In 2035 the wave of mergers and centralization has left Denmark with three regional universities – one in Jutland, one on Fyn and one on Zealand. Together the three universities cover all relevant research disciplines and educations relevant to society. They are served by only one Danish University Library, simply called The University Library.

The University Library has four primary tasks:

information supply
support for information and data literacy
consulting services in connection with the university’s research
physical learning environments

Information supply
In 2035 the information resources used in higher education is 100% digital. The traditional commercial publishing system succumbed several years ago and has been replaced by 100% open access publishing. In addition to the supply of scientific literature The University Library curates datasets with open data relevant for research and education as well as other materials such as 3D scans of molecules and historical artifacts which can be searched, downloaded and elaborated. All materials is accessibly via a single search interface.

Support of information and data literacy
The amount of information is complex and actors in research and education use many different types of materials, sources and formats in their work. The University Library teaches and supervise academic staff and students at the university in information seeking, source criticism, reference management, data management, data handling and data visualization. The instructions is embedded in the curriculum and is carried out both physically and online.

Partner in research
The librarians of The University Library acts as consultants and partners in university research projects. They assist on systematic reviews, bibliometric analyzes, instructions for data handling and data management and several other aspects of the research process. Often the librarian embed in larger research projects over a period of time.

Where people meet
In 2035 the physical space is more important than ever. The digitization of society activities has not – as some predicted – changed the basic human need to meet physically for dialogue and cooperation in order to develop and learn about the world. The University Library has a number of physical devices attached to the academic environments of the three regional universities. The physical devices, simply called Libraries, functions primarily as hubs for projects, events and workshops related to research, education and learning. The decor of the Libraries are flexible and inspiring with furniture and technology to support creative processes and cooperation; Should one kick start a research project or pitch an idea for fellow students it happens at the Library.

That was my University Library anno 2035. Might look different next year. How does your University Library look in 2035?

Cheers

Christian

Libraries curating open data sources

August 25, 2016 / Christian Lauersen / 3 Comments

One of our main steppingstones in the creation of Digital Social Science Lab (DSSL ) was coffee. We made countless of coffee dates with various people around the Faculty of Social Sciences, Copenhagen University to talk about how they thought the faculty library’s upcoming data lab could be of value to them.

Over the coffee we heard a repeating need (especially from students) for access to data to play and work with. Often they got to know about a program for cleaning, analyzing, visualizing or in anyway handling data but needed some data to try it out on.It’s a very reasonable need: It’s hard to paint a picture if you have the brush but no colors to paint with.

We talked about that and came to the conclusion, that this need was pretty easy to solve: Libraries has been connecting the academic community to content for ages but instead of books or journals on various subjects, these students needed to be connected to some open data. There is plenty of good open data to go around it you know where to look so we decided to make a curated list of open data sources for them.

The list of open data sources has two purposes:

It connects students (and researchers for that matter) that has just explored a new tool for data handling and need some data to try it out on, with a curated list of open datasets of various kind. For many of these it’s not important what the data is about – they need some content so they can work with the tool and get better.
We decided also to focus on open datasets relevant to social sciences, so it also gives students and faculty members a door to valuable resources within their discipline.

The list contains both national and international datasets.

Link to the goodies: Digital Social Science Lab’s list op Open Data Sources

Happy data experimentation!

Christian

Libraries Opening Paths to Knowledge: The Data Literacy case

June 27, 2016June 27, 2016 / Christian Lauersen / Leave a comment

I’m attending the LIBER Conference 2016 on June 29 – Juli 1st in Helsinki, Finland, with a Poster Presentation together with data literacy partner in crime and name brother, Christian B. Knudsen.

The theme of this years conference is Libraries Opening Paths to Knowledge. I really like this framing because it implies that the path to knowledge for the ones we serve, the academic community, does not only lies in the collection of the library and the navigation of this, but also in the surrounding world. As LIBER writes on the conference website:

Ensuring access to knowledge has always been at the heart of the mission of research libraries. In the digital age, and with the growth of Open Science, this implies not only preserving and providing access to content but also opening up new pathways to interacting with and creating knowledge.

The theme are focusing on the following 4 implications on this matter:

1) Content and Processes

Working ever more closely with researchers throughout the research life cycle to encourage and help them to open up their research process and to make both their outputs and methodologies available during and beyond the life of a research project, libraries are moving from curation to creation and workflows.

2) Services

Engaging in user-led development of services, and a trend towards the creation of shared services as well as developing new methods and opportunities for user engagement.

3) Legal & Ethical

Keeping abreast of emerging legislative developments and considering how to act responsibly to address ethical issues in making data open. Opening up new pathways to knowledge and knowledge creation can also have legal and ethical implications related to copyright and data protection.

4) Space & Experimentation

Rethinking library spaces (physical and virtual) to open up opportunities for experimentation and the visualization of data, and leveraging e-infrastructure to support collaboration and sharing across borders and disciplines.

We are travelling to Helsinki with a poster presentation that have a leg in 1), 2) and 4). The poster is called “Connecting academia with data litearcy: The development of three data labs at Copenhagen University Library” and it looks like this:

The poster is the story about how the Copenhagen University Library, is crossing our Rubicon to expand the scope of the academic library from:

providing access to a (library) collection + supporting information literacy to navigate in this, to also:
point the academic community to the possibilities which is made possible with the rapid expansion and access to open data + tools, methods and skills to work with them to get wiser on the World that we are living in

In short: The building blocks for gaining new knowledge has changed. You don’t always need to actually look physical at the world to explore things. One could also set up an API track filter to harvest the Twitter hashtag for Brexit to explore what when down on Twitter when UK left the European Union. Research, education and learning has changed. And when those changes the Academic Library should take a long thorough look in the mirror to see if it’s need to change it’s setup. And I guess we should.

The development is very well illustrated by the story of when I did my master thesis in 2017 contrary to when Rasmus, a random dude studying sociology at University of Copenhagen, did his bachelor project:

Me (20o7): Did 5 interviews with a university director, a library director, two librarians and a governmental dude, to explore the function of the University Library in post modernity. Got 8 hours of interview on tape, transcript them all (took sooooo long), did word count in Word and then started analyzing different discourses from that.

Rasmus (2016): Scraped 2,4 millions posts from online forums about the shady cryptomarket to show how the political discourse has declined over time in this domain – using algorithmic topic modeling to analyze the giant corpus of text.

Our point is not that Rasmus’ works is better than mine was in 2007 – it’s still a valid method. Our point is that students and faculty members of today and the future got different opportunities and as a library we want to connect them with those opportunities.

Yours truly with the Liber 2016 poster

Below the Why, the What, the How + some more of Copenhagen University Library’s support of data literacy through three Data Labs.

Why?
Acacemic libraries have been supporting information literacy in academia for many years, but new technological possibilities requires a new skill set – data literacy. Today harvesting gigabytes of data from social media platforms, embedded sensors or open data repositories is no longer the exclusive domain of professors. First-year students have access to almost unlimited amounts of data, and the possibilities for vizualising this data, actually the necessity of visualizing huge datasets are unprecedented.

What?
To meet this inherent demand for data literacy, Copenhagen University Library has established three Data Labs at the faculty libraries for Humanities, Social Sciences and Natural & Health Sciences. The Data Labs are open platforms for supporting data literacy within studies and research through tutorials, workshops, and events on digital methods in the diverse subjects.

How?
The Data Labs connects academia with digital methods and skills with events and workshops and by connecting the different scholarly subjects with relevant software and hardware. We are trying to capture the whole data workflow from harvesting (e.g. NVivo, TCAT and Netvizz), cleaning (SPSS and OpenRefine), Analyzing (NVivo, Stata, SAS, SPSS and Excel) and Visualizing (Gephi). The Labs also provide relevant hardware like 3D scanners and powerful workstations.

Skills
The concept is both to provide access to establish a user driven community in the Data Labs but also to support digital methods through own library instructions. Data sciences is a faily new concept in academic libraries, and the skill set needed is not nescesarily present in the current staff. A key to success in establishing the datalabs has therefore been development of new competencies and skills in programming, data abstraction and visualization. No single information specialist is expected to be able to perform scientifically valid statistical analyses or visualizations of data. But a basic level of skills, adequate for harvesting simple data, cleaning, processing and graphing them is required.

On this matter also read: Librarians as Data Scientist, really?

Outreach
Connecting with the scholarly environment has had mixed results. Some subjects have eagerly grasped the opportunity to use the physical facilities for their own purposes. Other subjects has viewed the initiative with some skepticism. Especially the natural sciences has questioned the qualifications of the library in regards to data sciences. The initiative have however been uniformly well received – the need for improving the data literacy of students is universally recognized.

The Data Lab as Space
Different approaches has been taken in the physical setup. The Digital Social Science Lab has worked specifically with the decoration of the lab and has created a mobile and aesthetic learning environment which functions as an alternative to the traditional lecture hall or class room and also provides ‘otherspaces’ like a tent with a turn table. The other Data Labs has taken a more traditional approach with basic furnishing. The impression so far is, that students respond better to unconventional interior design.

On this matter also read: To work with data is to travel: The decor story of Digital Social Science Lab

Case: The data lab as network hub: creating a digital social scientific community
Digital Social Science Lab (DSSL) at Faculty Library of Social Sciences is not only a physical space but also a conceptual platform, which acts as a network hub – connecting students and researchers interested in digital methods across subjects and institutions. The Library takes a facilitating role in that process by creating a social environment around DSSL, where digital skills can be distributed between peers. “Digital Methods Session” is a series of student-2-student-based events, where students can share their experiences with digital methods and tools and inspire and enlighten each other. Here you can e.g. meet sociology student Rasmus, who scraped 2,4 millions posts from online forums about the shady cryptomarket to show how the political discourse has declined over time in this domain – using algorithmic topic modeling to analyze the giant corpus of text. The interdisciplinarity of these sessions are a really important aspect in order to create a unique learning context with a broad range of perspectives, and to give the students a possibility to network with likeminded people with DSSL as the facilitating platform.

See you in Helsinki!

Cheers

Christian

Exploring the data journey in social sciences

May 19, 2016May 23, 2016 / Christian Lauersen / 3 Comments

In Digital Social Science Lab (DSSL) at The Faculty Library of Social Sciences we support education, research and learning within social sciences by connecting students and faculty members with digital tools and methods through different kinds of events, workshops, lectures and projects.

Some instructions we handle our self and some we facilitate.

For the part we have in-house skills + software and hardware to carry out we have developed a data workflow. We like not only to focus on one thing, e.g. harvesting or cleaning, but to see the work with data in academia as a journey or a process where the different parts of handling and analyzing data is connected (actually the physical setup and decor of the lab also is grounded in the concept of traveling – I wrote about it here: https://christianlauersen.net/2015/11/23/to-work-with-data-is-to-travel/)

In order to communicate that + the types of software and hardware DSSL offers we have made this visualization:

My question to fellow data librarians, schorlary communication people and students + academics of the world is:

1) Does this visualization make sense?

2) Is there software and/or steps in the data workflow that should be added to the list?

The list has come to life after tons of coffee talks with students and faculty members who has shared there input to the concept of DSSL and the content we should work on.

Looking forward to your feedback

Cheers

Christian

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