Academic Libraries as Key Partners for Data Literacy Education

The concept of the “teaching library,” which originated in the Anglo-American world, describes all activities of libraries in the field of promoting information, media, and data literacy, as well as other skills in dealing with analog and digital media. Although data literacy is explicitly mentioned in this definition, many training courses in academic libraries seem to focus more on promoting library use, information, and media literacy. According to the German Libraries’ Information Literacy Portal, a large number of university libraries across Germany offer courses and introductions to information literacy. This article focuses on the growing importance of academic libraries in teaching data literacy. This trend is set to continue, given that the creation of data management plans, as well as the indexing, storage and reuse of research data, have become standard elements of the research process. The integration of these elements in the basic data literacy course of the Data Literacy Initiative (DaLI) at TH Köln, in cooperation with the university library, is described below.