Presentation by John B. Howard, head librarian at University College Dublin, for the Information Skills for the Future event, organised by the Career Development Group of the Library Association of Ireland on April 2nd 2015

1. The Expert Library: Emergent Needs in
Academic and Special Libraries
John B Howard (UCD)
LAI CDG Information skills for the future

2. When does the ‘future’ actually get here?
• RISM Project Librarian (1983)
• Objectives:
– Descriptive bibliography (metadata)
– Musical data (encoded musical incipits)
– Tools for identifying and improving understanding of historical
repertories
– Dissemination
• Skills required:
– Subject skills (musical, paleographical, linguistic)
– Musical data representation, music information retrieval
– Computational (IBM VM/CMS System 370/390, IBM JCL,
IBM/Waterloo SCRIPT + IBM GML, PL1 Subset G, PL11, SPIRES,
Z39.2; HPUX, C, perl, SPIRES, PostScript, TCP/IP, gopher, HTTP,
Z39.50)

3. assumptions
• The future arrived a long time ago
• Academic research libraries will continue to evolve in
the direction of centres of expertise in data,
information & knowledge management
• Academic library expertise profiles should reflect the
overall characteristics of the host organisation
• Libraries are increasingly be differentiated by their
expert services and the profile of the host organisation
• Libraries are ideally situated to facilitate connections
among the informatics of many disciplines
• The biggest barriers to progress are social expectations

4. technical library skills
• Resource description:
standard frameworks
• Subject analysis & topical
heading assignments
• Classification
• Indexing
• Resource management
• LMS management
• Reporting
• Resource description:
many other frameworks
• Assignment of
vocabularies from
pertinent knowledge
domains
• Linked Data, Ontologies
• Metadata analysis
• Systems and relationship
management

5. other core skills
• Frameworks for information representation: database
formats, database & metadata schemas; XML & JSON
for representing metadata
• Frameworks for representation of textual information
• Differentiating visual, archival, bibliographic,
cartographic & other information types
• Theoretical knowledge: thesaurus & ontology creation
& representation; indexing
• Data types, data semantics, data characteristics
• Understanding the scholarly communications
landscape

6. applications of skills
• Literacies:
– Digital mapping & GIS
concepts
– Data visualisation
– Basic quantitative
analytics
– Ethical use of
information
• Competencies:
– Compliance
– Certifications
• Data skills
– Data representation
– Data semantics
– Data storage
– Data capture
– Data evaluation
– Data dissemination
– Data normalisation,
cleaning
– Data integration

7. examples of emergent roles
• Metadata Analyst
• Quantitative Data Analyst
• Informatics Scientist
• Bioinformatics Scientist
• Biostatistician
• Computational Biologist
• Medical Imaging Specialist
• Geographic Information
Services Librarian
• Digital repository
developer/manager
• Digital Projects Librarian
• Web applications developer
• Maker Librarian
• Visualisation Librarian
• Scholarly Communications
Librarian
• Data Curator
• Digital Preservation Librarian
• Data Scientist
• Web integration specialist
• Subject liaison -> Embedded
librarian