Importance of Information Specialists to Spearhead Data Science Movement in Bangladesh

 

Aktarul Islam

Data science is an emerging concept in the academic and intellectual societies in Bangladesh. It is a multidisciplinary approach concerning statistics, computing, coding, artificial intelligence, robotics, and other dynamic fields of applied science. In addition, data science helps researchers and academicians extract significant insights to analyze large amounts of data. When data are vague, critical, and large enough to scrutinize, data science comes as a rescuer to combine tools and technology to produce meaning from data and recommend the best way of action to realize why something happened.

For centuries, libraries have been the repositories for preserving knowledge and research materials. In this world of information and industrial revolution, data science is becoming a more pertinent option for analyzing big data, and librarians or information scientists have long been spearheading the movement of handling vast amounts of data for research and development initiatives.

Nowadays, research is becoming more data-intensive in Bangladesh. Research scholars are getting intricacy with new challenges in managing and sharing research data due to their complexity and obscurity in nature and volume. Information scientists can play substantial roles in transforming imprecise data into an operational set-up that helps researchers, scholars, and academicians make decisions about their innovative roles to solve complex problems. To keep pace with the revolutionary world of research and development, Bangladeshi librarians and information scientists must gather expertise in statistics, research methodology, information literacy, mathematics, programming, and domain knowledge to pull out key insights and information from the convoluted and vast datasets. 

Libraries, often known as information centers, house massive amounts of data and information for various purposes. As a result, big data technologies and the data science movement have transformed libraries into strong ‘Knowledge Organisms’ capable enough to alleviate the gap between the "have" and "have not" and launch information literacy campaigns for everyone in our society.  Librarians and information scientists may assist in spearheading data science and big data movement by providing prompt access to information superhighways for arranging educational conferences, formulating ICT-oriented courses, and providing research data management services for scholars and researchers.

To participate in the data science movement, information scientists and library professionals must focus on collection development policy for big data in libraries and information centers. They need to ensure that scholars, researchers, and other stakeholders have access to information regarding big data and data analytics approaches. Moreover, academic libraries and information centers must offer courses on data science training for library staff and other information science professionals to enable them to take the lead in spearheading the data science movement in Bangladesh.

The academic world has been getting a new shape due to the revolution in the data science movement and librarians or information scientists are engaging themselves with the fastest-evolving phenomenon related to big data management and tools and strategies for supporting data-driven research and instruction in the advanced countries. It is time for Bangladeshi information science professionals to reconsider their roles in leveraging the full potential in information management, pedagogical instruction, and research support to push the data science movement forward to cope with the rest of the world community.