Abstract
The role and the job duties of librarians may evolve owing to social changes and users’ needs. It is important to know academic libraries have adapted to their needs. Data librarians have held a key position in academic libraries. In this study, we investigated the adaptation in their job duties over 25 years. We conducted content analyses using descriptions of job advertisements to examine changes in the role and job duties of data librarians to clarify libraries’ adaptation. All job advertisements for data librarians posted in the IFLA - Library and Information Science Jobs Mailing List from 1995 to 2022 were collected, and 36 job advertisements were obtained after the preprocessing procedures. Based on job titles, data librarians for specific subjects were needed in the early days, and research data librarians appeared in recent years. Job descriptions indicate that data librarians were required to have knowledge of data about various subjects and use statistical analysis software to process data from 2000–2004; however, knowledge of research data was required from 2015–2022. There have been many other changes in work performed by data librarians over the past 25 years, and libraries have regularly adapted their job descriptions.
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This work is supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) KAKENHI Grant Number JP18K18508.
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Suzuki, T., Ishita, E., Ma, X., Putranto, W.A., Watanabe, Y. (2022). Data Librarians: Changes in Role and Job Duties Over 25 Years. In: Tseng, YH., Katsurai, M., Nguyen, H.N. (eds) From Born-Physical to Born-Virtual: Augmenting Intelligence in Digital Libraries. ICADL 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13636. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21756-2_40
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21756-2_40
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