{"id":150,"date":"2016-06-13T13:00:12","date_gmt":"2016-06-13T11:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs2.abo.fi\/bcbd\/?p=150"},"modified":"2016-06-13T13:04:40","modified_gmt":"2016-06-13T11:04:40","slug":"public-libraries-from-big-data-to-big-service","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs2.abo.fi\/bcbd\/2016\/06\/13\/public-libraries-from-big-data-to-big-service\/","title":{"rendered":"Public Libraries: From Big Data to Big Service"},"content":{"rendered":"

The amount of research focused on Big Data has been increasing from the last four years. The opportunities and issues of Big Data have been discussed in various fields, such as computer science, information system or business management. Whereas, there is one gap still exiting, the one which is between Big Data and public libraries. Though researchers (Gordon-Murnane<\/a>, Hoy<\/a>, Huwe<\/a>, Wittmann and Reinhalter<\/a>) have concentrated on combining Big Data with libraries, there are few studies mainly narrowing down the domain to the public library and discuss the possibilities of the combination of Big Data and public libraries. This situation motivates the project: Big Cities Meet Big Data: A Case of Turku (http:\/\/blogs2.abo.fi\/bcbd\/<\/a>), which contains one subproject: Library Big Data: Digital Collections as Big Data. In this subproject, one research question is proposed: what is the role of the public library in managing Big Data and bringing Big Data to citizens? This question is asked based on the premise: the existence of Big Data in a reality in public libraries.<\/p>\n

In order to answer the research question, a survey was designed. The content of library data was reviewed and three librarians were interviewed which was considered as helpful material to design the survey questionnaire.\u00a0 (The link to the questionnaire is: https:\/\/survey.abo.fi\/lomakkeet\/7925\/lomake.html<\/a> ) Eight roles were put forward according to the result of the review and the interview, which are educator, marketer, data organizer, data maintainer, advisor, advocator, developer and organization server. In the end, the result of the survey raises interesting statements.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Big Data: quite a vague concept for librarians.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    The target group of the survey is Finnish librarians working in the public library. When filling the questionnaire, many respondents mentioned that they have no clear understanding of Big Data. In another word, the concept of Big Data is not well understood in the Finnish public library. This result corresponds to the statement of many studies that there is no consensus of Big Data definition. In order to define Big Data, three Vs, four Vs, five Vs or three Cs have been proposed. The result of such condition complicates the understanding of Big Data. There is no standard to guide individuals from different professions to follow certain definitions. As such, it is no doubt that librarians in Finland hold unclear understanding of Big Data.<\/p>\n

      \n
    1. Big Data: a natural way to go<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      It is worthy outlining that respondents in the survey tend to hold positive attitude towards public libraries involving Big Data even though they do not authentically understand what Big Data is. From their point of view, public libraries would do with Big Data naturally regardless of the challenges or issues.<\/p>\n

        \n
      1. From Big Data to Big Service<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

        when being asked what kind of roles that could be undertaken by public libraries, the respondents agree with all the roles which is designed to serve citizens. That is to say, Big Data, in the context of public libraries, are more considered as a method to provide more or better services. As is mentioned in the open question replies of the survey, various service should be developed to help citizens in the generation of data explosion, such as teaching individuals how to benefit from Big Data analytics or how to discovering valuable Big Data resources. The book recommendation system of Amozon is also one of good examples of libraries applying Big Data to service improvement. All of those services stemmed from Big Data could be called Big Service, which might be developed into a systematical service model and employed to satisfy library users.<\/p>\n

        All in all, the resource limitation situation causes almost every organization to exploit as much as possible from their current resources. Public libraries, as one of the society elements, should do the same thing as well. Plus, government investment in libraries has been decreasing recently, which pushes the resource limitation situation into a more difficult level in our libraries. Since data is in explosion and Big Data could be helpful resource for the library, our public library should devote themselves in discovering more possibilities from Big Data to build up Big Service. Even though this process would be very hard, the outcome could lead the public library to moving forward in a long period of time.<\/p>\n

         <\/p>\n

        PS: this article is based on my project paper which is under review of an academic journal.<\/p>\n

        References<\/strong><\/p>\n

        GORDON-MURNANE, L. 2012. Big Data: A Big Opportunity for Librarians. Online,<\/em> 36,<\/strong> 30-34.<\/p>\n

        HOY, M. B. 2014. Big Data: An Introduction for Librarians. Medical reference services quarterly,<\/em> 33,<\/strong> 320-326.<\/p>\n

        HUWE, T. K. 2014. Big Data and the Library: A Natural Fit. Computers in Libraries,<\/em> 34,<\/strong> 17-18.<\/p>\n

        WITTMANN, R. J. & REINHALTER, L. 2014. The Library: Big Data’s Boomtown. The Serials Librarian,<\/em> 67,<\/strong> 363-372.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

        The amount of research focused on Big Data has been increasing from the last four years. The opportunities and issues of Big Data have been discussed in various fields, such as computer science, information system or business management. Whereas, there is one gap still exiting, the one which is between Big Data and public libraries. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":205,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs2.abo.fi\/bcbd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs2.abo.fi\/bcbd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs2.abo.fi\/bcbd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs2.abo.fi\/bcbd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/205"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs2.abo.fi\/bcbd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=150"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs2.abo.fi\/bcbd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":152,"href":"https:\/\/blogs2.abo.fi\/bcbd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150\/revisions\/152"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs2.abo.fi\/bcbd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs2.abo.fi\/bcbd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs2.abo.fi\/bcbd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}