Next steps for Text & Data Mining

Sometimes the best way to find a solution is to just get the different stakeholders talking to each other – and this what happened at a recent Text and Data Mining symposium held in the Engineering Department at Cambridge.

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Background

This symposium grew out of a discussion held earlier this year at Cambridge to consider the issue of TDM and what a TDM library service might look like at Cambridge. The general outcome of that meeting of library staff was that people wanted to know more. Librarians at Cambridge have developed a Text and Data Mining libguide to assist.

So this year the OSC has been doing some work around TDM, including running a workshop at Research Libraries UK annual conference in March. This was a discussion about developing a research library position statement on Text and Data Mining in the UK. The slides from that event are available and we published a blog post about the discussion.

We have also had discussions with different groups about this issue including the Future TDM project which has been looking to increase the amount of TDM happening across Europe. This project is now finishing up. The impression we have around the sector is that ‘everyone wants to know what everyone else is doing’.

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Round table discussion

During the hour long session the conversation moved from high level problems to workflows. How do we actually do this? As is the way with these types of events, it was really only in the last 10 minutes that the real issues emerged. What was clear was something I have repeatedly observed over the past few years – that the players in this space including librarians, researchers and publishers, have very little idea of how the others work and their needs. I have actually heard people say: ‘If only they understood…’

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