Data Information Literacy: New Comptencies in a Cyberinfrastructure-Enabled World

In the Earth Sciences, as in all areas of science, cyberinfrastructure and ‘e-science' have become increasingly important to the collection, display, processing, evaluation, and interoperability of data. Scientists flooded with edata (who are, themselves, contributing to the flood) need increasingly complex and intelligent ways to consume, handle, and produce research data. As a result, librarians can no longer just provide access to the published literature and must instead be involved much earlier in the publication process; at the point where data are first engaged and produced. In addition to being involved in the building of systems and technologies that foster data stewardship and retrieval, librarians must be able to help researchers leverage those tools, to interact with data, and to contribute derivative (or original) data to disciplinary or institutional repositories that comply with the standards of the scholarly community. Because much of the power of e-science is lost, or at least not wholly realized, without an understanding of these structures and concepts of information management, our next generation of researchers will be doing a disservice to their scientific communities if they are not trained to find, use, evaluate, and contribute data in the same way they are trained to work with scientific literature. By expanding our notions of information literacy to include data information management, then, librarians can help provide a foundation of skills to researchers to more fully actualize the promise of e-science. To this end, in Spring 2008 the authors taught a three credit graduate course in geoinformatics within our Earth and Atmospheric Sciences department wherein we attempted to develop 'data information literate' scientists. We will briefly discuss the course we offered and extrapolate from our experiences what it means to be 'data information literate.'