Providing real-world data experiences: Libraries as data providers and clients in student consulting projects

Teaching faculty and instructors often seek experiential opportunities for students to hone the data science skills they learn in class, using real-world data and working with real-world clients. University libraries are an ideal partner for such projects, overcoming the challenges and barriers associated with establishing partnerships with industry or organizational clients external to the university. Libraries have data from many sources, but limited time and expertise to leverage these data, and thus such projects can benefit libraries as well. Since the summer of 2020, Carnegie Mellon University Libraries (UL) have partnered with the Department of Statistics & Data Science (SDS) in their project-orientated courses and undergraduate research apprenticeships, providing a wide range of datasets and research questions for data analysis projects. These projects make use of a broad range of data sources including internal library usage data, bibliographic data on publications, grants from subscription databases, and open datasets on topics of interest to librarianship and library service development. Student teams use these datasets to answer practical research questions posed by UL faculty and staff, periodically meeting with the UL team to refine the questions and direct project development. This presentation will discuss this partnership with SDS, provide an overview of student projects, and will consider logistical considerations for this work. We will describe potential data types available through libraries that can be leveraged for mutually beneficial projects that provide students with real-world data science applications and the library with an opportunity to pursue data-driven service and tool development