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Completion of IMLS Grant Project on Data Quality Literacy

Completion of IMLS Grant Project on Data Quality Literacy

In February 2025, Grace Liu, Associate Professor and Business Librarian at F.H.G. Library, and her team completed the 2.5-year Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) grant project on data quality literacy. This project was a collaboration between West Chester University, Stanford University, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The project received $149,992 IMLS funding for a National Forum proposal “Building Capacity of Academic Librarians in Understanding Quantitative Data, Data Quality Problems, and Evaluating Data Quality.” The project aimed to raise academic librarians’ awareness of data quality issues, fill their knowledge gaps, and build academic librarians’ capacity and confidence in teaching data evaluation, critical thinking about data, and data literacy.

During the first year, with the help of Standard University’s Event Operations Team, the project team organized seven online national forum webinar sessions. These sessions covered topics, including

1. Evaluating Data Quality: Challenges and Competencies;
2. Quality Assurance in Data Creation;
3. Understanding Commercial Data Quality Issues;
4. Evaluating Governmental Data (U.S. and International);
5. Data Quality: Reproducibility and Preservation;
6. Data Quality: Evolving Employer Expectations; and
7. Librarians' Role in Cultivating Data-Literate Citizens.

These sessions featured a diverse panel of experts, including data librarians from Princeton, Stanford, Yale, and the University of California, Berkeley; the Chief Scientist of the U.S. Census Bureau; the former Chief Statistician of the United States; and data experts from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), Catholic Charities USA, Federal Reserve Banks of Cleveland and Kansas City, Cornell University’s Labor Dynamics Institute, Meta Platforms, Inc., Microsoft Research, the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, Ithaka S+R, and the American Statistical Association.

The sessions drew 3,348 unique registrants and 1,931 attendees from six continents and 55 countries, representing over 1,000 institutions, including academic institutions, public libraries, NGOs, central banks, government agencies, corporations, state and national libraries, healthcare systems, and school libraries.

During the second year, the project team edited the national forum transcripts into an open-access eBook, Data Quality Literacy Guidebook, which includes seven chapters, 20 subchapters, case studies, inspiring quotes, charts and graphs, resources, Q&A, and appendices. In addition, the project developed 13 knowledge briefs outlining synthesized data evaluation strategies, including

1. Data Reference Interview
2. Evaluating Data Documentation
3. Evaluating Dataset for Research Needs
4. Using and Evaluating U.S. Federal Statistics
5. Understanding Administrative Data
6. Evaluating Administrative Data Quality
7. Understanding Commercial Data
8. Evaluating Commercial Data Quality
9. Commercial Data Quality: Conversation with the Vendors
10. Commercial Data Quality: Conversation with Researchers
11. Evaluating International Government Data Quality
12. Understanding Survey Data and Public Poll
13. Evaluating Survey Data Quality

The knowledge briefs serve as a framework for academic librarians to organize literacy instruction sessions on data quality or engage in deeper conversations with faculty or researchers on data quality literacy topics. For example, in the one-shot library instruction, there are potential opportunities for librarians to highlight specific data quality issues such as missing values, data errors, or biases that the students need to be aware of when using data or further developing data-related critical thinking skills.

 

The team prepared a comprehensive promotion plan distributing the project and its deliverables through 27 channels. They were invited to share their projects at several key events such as the 2023 Beyond the Numbers Conference organized by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, the 2024 International Association for Social Science Information Service and Technology (IASSIST) Webinar, 2025 The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) Business Librarians Affinity Group Webinar, the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Digital Scholarship Webinar, and the Hawaii University graduate student seminar. Since its official release in November 2024, the project website attracted over 4,000 users and 7,800 views.

In the final phase of the project, West Chester University students Niko Galioto, a graphic design major, and Zoe Martin, a marketing major, joined the team to assist with the project website, knowledge brief design, and promotion. Their contributions significantly enhanced the project's visual quality and project outcomes while also building their portfolios for graduation.

The national forum webinar series, eBook, and knowledge briefs laid the foundation for the knowledge of data quality literacy. They empowered academic librarians to teach critical thinking about data and increased their confidence in discussing data quality issues with database vendors and researchers.

Learn more by visiting the project website: https://www.dataqualityliteracy.org.