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4      IASSIST Quarterly Summer/Fall  2004     

Editor’s Notes

I am pleased to be able to present this special double issue 
of the IASSIST Quarterly (IQ issues Vol. 28-2 and 28-3). 
We have eight articles on the subject of “data literacy”. This 
subject has been the focus of many IASSIST efforts and 
the enhancement of data literacy is the daily work of many 
IASSIST members. These members are making a great 
contribution to the building of competences for evaluation 
of information. Furthermore, I am glad to announce that 
these articles have been collected by some very active 
chairpersons: Louise Corti from the UK Data Archive at the 
University of Essex and Wendy Watkins from the Library 
Data Centre at the Carleton University Library. The work of 
compiling articles for the IASSIST Quarterly is not always 
the isolated effort of the IQ-editor. Others are very much 
welcome to do special issues like this one. Great thanks to 
Louise and Wendy. 

Karsten Boye Rasmussen, June 2005

Guest Editor’s Notes

This special issue of IQ brings together a collection of 
papers centred on the important topic of literacy as it 
relates to data.   As we shall see from the contributors, a 
number of terms are often used: data literacy, information 
literacy, statistical literacy, quantitative reasoning.  These 
concepts are different, yet they intertwine.  But they all 
point to one key element: the importance of acquiring 
skills for evaluating ‘information.’   Literacy means 
having the knowledge, skills and experience to tackle the 
interpretation of research fi ndings and confront data from 
an informed and critical persuasion. 

The eight contributions presented here arise out of 
IASSIST annual conferences held over the past two 
years.  The introduction of data in the classroom and 
the teaching of statistical literacy has become a growing 
concern for data librarians, and this area now features as an 
increasingly popular theme at successive IASSIST events.   
In 2004, at the Madison Wisconsin conference, a session 
on Developing Statistical Literacy: Think Globally, Work 
Locally was held while in 2003 in Ottawa, two sessions 
were devoted to Advancing Research and Data Literacy: 
Empowering Users and Understanding the Strength of 
Numbers: Statistical Literacy. 

Data librarians are at the front line - students hungry for 
data cannot completely rely on their own departments for 
guidance in more complex data or analytic matters.  We 
have all experienced the fl urry of queries at dissertation 
time, that go well beyond the basic question of How do I 
download this dataset or open this codebook? Frighteningly 
basic questions plague our help desks on a daily basis: 
Help, I have downloaded data but have no clue what to 
do next. What is SPSS?  What is the difference between a 
variable and value?  I have 468 cross tabs, all which have a 
p-value of .5 - what does this mean?   Data librarians have 

a role to play in helping facilitate the use of real data in 
the classroom, and to help support faculty to improve data 
and statistical literacy.   But, for the data librarian, how and 
where does such accumulation of knowledge and skills take 
place?  

All the papers here describe particular ways in which the 
challenges of improving statistical literacy have been 
addressed at an institutional or regional level.  They provide 
useful and appealing case studies that have been trialed 
to help educate new students and lecturers, supervisors, 
mentors and data support staff who do not feel entirely 
competent in working with numeric data.  

In the fi rst paper, Milo Schield considers, specifi cally, 
the challenges of teaching data and statistical to students, 
and how data librarians can play a role in this education.  
He discusses the meaning and interaction of the terms 
information, data and statistical literacy and how they all 
engender critical thinking skills.  Karen Hunt goes on to 
raise the key challenge, highlighted in all the papers, of 
how to help students develop information literacy skills.  
She discusses her own experiences, as the University of 
Winnipeg Information Literacy Coordinator, of attempting 
to help integrate data literacy into the subject curriculum 
through collaboration with teachers.   What are the best 
practices for developing data literacy and what aspects can 
be applied from the information literacy fi eld?  Again, the 
importance of training for data librarians in how to both 
promote and teach data literacy arises as a pivotal matter. 

The next two papers move on from Karen Hunt’s local 
initiative to examine broader issues concerning the 
training of staff within libraries and data libraries to be 
better equipped to service data requests and support users 
requests.  Wendy Watkins discusses the creation of a 
national peer-to-peer training programme for data librarians 
in Canada, that came about as a result of the Canadian’s 
Data Liberation Initiative (DLI) in 1996.  The initiative 
opened a new channel of access to Statistics Canada’s 
quantitative and spatial data fi les, for which a national 
support infrastructure was not already established.  Her 
paper elucidates the strategies through which a core set 
of competencies was established throughout data library 
services in Canada.    She points to the challenges of 
initiating a large-scale training programme, starting from 
a small base of seasoned data librarians, but goes on to 
highlight the success of regional networking and the rapid 
escalation of an enthusiastic data community.   

Anne Gray’s paper follows on with another Canadian 
example in which she examines the relevance of data 
and statistical literacy for librarians.  She argues that 
librarians benefi t from having a healthy interest in data 
and statistics so they can provide greater assistance to 
users. The paper provides us with a couple of interesting 
case studies showing ways of evaluating statistically-
oriented publications from a methodological and analytical 
perspective. How do we recognise and judge quality of 
content? Anne Gray usefully points us to Canadian and 
US standards for documenting the quality of government 
statistical publications.



  IASSIST Quarterly Summer/Fall 2004              5

The next paper by Susan Czarnocki and Anastassia Khouri 
offers us a detailed account of how the McGill Libraries 
Electronic Data Resources Service (EDRS) was set up and 
how it is currently run.  The service is part of a grouping of 
library services that provide access and support for various 
kinds of digital information in the form of maps, electronic 
data and digital government information.  Staff with 
specialisations in particular kinds of data resources work 
to support for all research and instructional activities.  The 
paper describes examples of approaches taken with respect 
to supporting use of data in undergraduate curricula and for 
graduate students.

Daniel Edelstein and Kristi Thompson describe the work of 
the Data and Statistical Services (DSS) unit in the library 
at Princeton, in providing both consulting on statistical 
methods and software support for data library users.  The 
staff provide a practical, problem-oriented and intuitive 
approach that helps individual social science students 
feel more confi dent about taking on statistical analysis 
for their research projects.  The paper argues that well-
resourced data professionals can work proactively and 
collaboratively with faculty to enhance the statistical skills 
of undergraduate students.

The last two papers consider actual examples of teaching 
sometimes conceptually diffi cult statistical topics in 
context.  Context can mean embedding the learning old 
techniques in real-life applied social problems, building 
on social theory, or by situating the confrontation and 
manipulation of data in a friendly user interface, with 
simple metadata to hand.

Louise Corti provides a behind the scenes look at a project 
undertaken to increase the use of real data sources in the 
classroom, and in a more ambitious sense, to help improve 
the data and statistical literacy of those studying social 
sciences, from school students age 16-19 to postgraduates.  
In a collaborative effort of a national data archive with 
teachers, the project created a set of free teaching and 
learning data and statistics-oriented resources based on 
the study of crime in society.  Learning strategies were 
adopted that encourage the teaching of research methods 
and statistics within a substantive context.  An online set 
of resources was created with data exploration available 
though the online data browsing system, Nesstar. The 
paper addresses both the positive and challenges that 
arose from running the project.   In a similar way, Aaron 
Shrimplin’s and Jen-chien Yu’s piece provides a case study 
of using another brand of innovative web-based tools for 
data presentation and exploration, SDA.   Through close 
collaboration with faculty, the local initiative showed both 
students and teaching staff at Miami University how data 
and data analysis could be accessible to them. 

Shrimplin and Corti’s papers both describe projects and 
activities that offer ‘data confrontation’ through the use 
of tailored datasets delivered through user-friendly web 
interfaces, but while situated in substantive reasoning.  
Students are enticed and lecturers quickly appreciate the 
benefi ts that complimentary e-learning approaches can 
offer their own typically linear teaching pathways.

These papers in this Special Issue offer us useful 
practical ideas about how to help students with handling, 
manipulation and interpretation of data.  The ideas 
described point to collaboration as the key to achieving 
informed and intuitive appreciation and use of data.  
Starting locally by supporting faculty is a great way to test 
out some of practical strategies described here.

Other benefi ts of promoting and improving ways of 
utilising data in the classroom are also apparent. Improved 
data literacy hopefully means greater usage of our richly-
stocked national data stores. And, upping our user fi gures 
can be seen as a welcome added benefi t.

All of the authors featuring are or have been dedicated 
IASSIST members.  We all recognise that IASSIST has a 
signifi cant role to play in helping nurture new generations 
of data service providers who can help build a persistent 
culture of statistically-literate students, researchers and 
professionals.  And may this wave of commitment to and 
enthusiasm for the cause of statistical literacy thrive!’!’

Louise Corti and Wendy Watkins, May 2005