Book Launch — Citizen Science Skilling for Library Staff, Researchers, and the Public
The LIBER Citizen Science Working Group is pleased to announce the publication of the first section of their Citizen Science for Research Libraries Guide, a four-part book series.
The guide is designed to be a practical toolbox to help run a citizen science project. It has been put together from contributions by members of the research library community and has been thoroughly peer-reviewed.
The first section (Citizen Science Skilling for Library Staff, Researchers, and the Public) focuses on the use of data and this new challenging role for the library — in public engagement and supporting researchers. The guide provides a number of step-by-step guides and concrete project examples. In the guide, you will learn about the different roles for citizens in a project, project management, communication, the use of data and knowledge provided by citizens, questions of FAIR data, and how scientific literacy can be used for co-creation and education in citizen science.
Researchers have been branching out into new areas of citizen science as digital services have pervaded many parts of our lives, such as — wearable health-tracking, using data for COVID‑19, and for climate change mitigation and monitoring. Research libraries are in a unique position to offer up the frameworks and infrastructures built by the open science movement for wider use by researchers in society.
Moreover, Citizen science is quite often closely linked to the creation of data. Citizen science can be used by the researcher to identify which data may answer their questions or in increasing scientific literacy in the wider society by attracting citizens and other stakeholders interested in the data: collecting data, telling the story of the data, or repurposing data.
Citizen science is a key pillar of open science. The UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science for the first time creates consensus on definitions and principles for open science. Citizen science plays a variety of roles in the overall open science endeavour of the democratization of knowledge.
Lastly, this guide is part of a themed series of four sections based on the LIBER Open Science Roadmap that covers the essentials to support citizen science projects: skills, infrastructures, good practice, and programme development.
Read the open-access guide here and please spread the word by retweeting our update about the book here (using #CS4RL). For further details, feel free to contact Simon Worthington, Co-Editor-in-Chief via email: simon.worthington@tib.eu.