Hooking Up Data with Literacy: Creating an Educational Framework for Uppsala University Library

Abstract

Uppsala University Library offers a range of workshops and lectures for students and researchers in order to help them improve their information seeking skills, academic writing and critical scientific thinking. Our library education program mainly focuses on sources such as books or scholarly articles but students in many subject fields often face additional challenges since they have to handle large amounts of data. We identified the fact that we were hardly incorporating data management in our library education as a potential weakness.  This project was developed in order to determine if the library should get involved in teaching data literacy.

The project involved gathering knowledge on how data is being taught at the university by conducting a student and teacher survey. A data module was developed and incorporated to the existing framework focusing on information literacy. The module was tested and evaluated by a pilot group of students. Our findings indicate that the University Library should begin teaching data literacy. We believe data to be one of the current challenges for Academic libraries and a key for staying relevant for students and researchers.