This chapter is intended mainly for the researcher. Its main goal is to identify what services are already provided or could be planned by academic libraries, identified as important stakeholders in facilitating Research 2.0. Indicating the changing contexts of literacies, the focus is on research-related literacies, such as information literacy, academic literacy and data literacy, which pertain to the advisory and educational roles of the academic library. The ways of counterbalancing information overload, partially by personal information management are also described. After outlining the importance of data-intensive research, services facilitating research data management, (including the preparation of data-management plans) are portrayed. Issues of data curation, data quality and data citation, as well as the ways to identify professionals, who provide services to researchers, are outlined.
TopBackground: Changing Literacies In The Changing Contexts Of Research
The range of literacies related to the activities of a researcher is wide. Nonetheless, there is a clearly identifiable core that includes information literacy, academic literacy and data literacy.
The scope of these research-related literacies is defined by new dimensions of research, altered research processes, and more complex requirements in research documentation and publishing. Today research information and data come in many guises, in diverse and often complex forms. This poses challenges to the researcher, since both information and data are the very heart of research. The main issues resulting from this changing context will be portrayed in this subsection.
Being literate used to mean knowing how to sign someone’s name, then the ability to read and write Latin. Later on, its definition changed again to being able to read and understand a newspaper in someone’s own language (Lankshear & Knobel, 2004). Digital technologies have further transformed its meaning. As a result, the word literacy has been put in plural, thus coining various literacies (literacy types) (Stordy, 2015). Contemporary concepts of literacy include visual, electronic, and digital forms of expression and communication. Despite of this, literacies are not restricted to any particular technology that is especially true for scholarly communication because it is heavily focused on the use of texts, disregarding the medium that carries them, so it requires that we focus on meaning and context (Cordes, 2009). Tied to functional literacy, which most commonly denotes the ability to read, understand and use information, essential for everyday life (Bawden, 2001), both literacy and literacies also remain valid in the print environment. Obviously, we can suppose that any researcher has acquired the skills of reading literacy that can be defined as an individual’s ability to understand printed text and communicate through print, and which, despite its name, involves the integration of listening, speaking, reading, writing, and numeracy.