33 Association of Research Libraries Research Library Issues 298 2019 student conducted sentiment analysis on historical dietary guidelines documents as a test of how to apply these methods to the digital library collections. Another student used data from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility19 to find geographic and temporal patterns in agricultural biodiversity data reporting. In 2018, when University of Maryland created a new Data Science specialization within their undergraduate information science degree, we learned that students need not be graduate students to have the necessary skills. Our fellowship could offer juniors and seniors an opportunity to practice data science in a meaningful context. A college senior, our first such student, developed scripts to automate the process of checking for public access policy compliance and establish a baseline for future tracking.20 Later in 2018, in a third iteration, we began testing the hypothesis that we could offer data science services to a client outside the library, staffing that service cost- effectively by hiring recent data science graduates as contractors, and managing that service using the same model developed with Maryland iSchool Fellows. Both the fellows and the contracted data scientists now meet regularly with a growing group of library staff who, in the course of their jobs, interface with or do data analytics. This interest group includes software developers, web analytics experts, data policy analysts, and indexers who are developing the NAL thesaurus.21 Capacity is growing and self-reinforcing. We developed a simple project template for data science projects that guides young data scientists to work closely with their “clients” to We learned that students need not be graduate students to have the necessary skills. Our fellowship could offer juniors and seniors an opportunity to practice data science in a meaningful context. A college senior, our first such student, developed scripts to automate the process of checking for public access policy compliance and establish a baseline for future tracking.
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