Data Curation Education: Cross-Disciplinary Analysis of Master's Programs

Abstract

With growing emphasis on data curation practice in both science and industry, there has been a call for information professionals to take on a substantial role in data curation. Library and information science (LIS) education has been responding to this call by offering various training opportunities from Master's education to professional development. The most recent effort to systematically review a data curation curriculum offered by ALA-accredited LIS schools was in 2012, so it is time to revisit the progress and evolution of data curation education. The main goal of this study is to analyze the course content from the syllabi of various programs to understand what is being taught in LIS schools throughout graduate-level education. Further, because the need for data curation is apparent across different disciplines, and thus not only LIS but also other disciplines have been offering data curation courses, this study also analyzed syllabi from other disciplines. A total of 80 syllabi were analyzed in this study: 15 syllabi from 9 ALA-accredited institutions and 65 syllabi from 53 institutions of Carnegie Classification (CC). Our findings suggest a notable growth in LIS education in data curation since 2012, but LIS education still provides less training in technical skills. There was also a distinctive difference in educational approach to teach data curation between LIS (user- and service-oriented) and other disciplines (technical skills−focused), which brought different strengths and weaknesses in curriculum.