Data Internship Summit 2025 with National Center for Data Services – Day 1

Posted by NNLM Region 7 on May 19th, 2025 Posted in: Blog
Tags: Data, librarians

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I attended the Data Internship Summit with the National Center for Data Servies (NCDS) in Washington, D.C. from April 15^th through April 17^th, 2025. This will be a three-part blog series that will cover all three days of the summit. This summit provided insight into the daily tasks and skills needed for those working in data librarianship, networking opportunities, as well as tools and resources to bring back to our institutions. We had the opportunity to visit the Library of Congress, National Library of Medicine, and the National Institute of Health Clinical Center.

The three days were spent with the past NCDS interns from the last three years. The Data Internship allows future librarians to gain practical experience to work in data librarianship, especially in the fields of health science and academia. The projects worked on include data cleaning, analyzation, visualization, and curation. It runs from June-August every year.

The first day of this summit was spent at the Library of Congress. We attended a panel hosted by the team that works on digital collections. They let us know the daily tasks of the work they do that range from website management, analyzing who their main users of their data, data visualization, peer review editing, digitizing films, and more. One of the useful visualization tools a few of the data librarians at the Library of Congress mentioned using was Tableau, which is one of my favorite tools for visualizing data.

One of the biggest topics for discussion was how do we as librarians let the public know that data or a certain collection is going away and what we are to do with the data after it is no longer accessible. Some of the soft skills mentioned by the panelists for this career path include integrity, trust, communication, and being knowledgeable about what others at your institution are doing.

We were introduced to Judith Conklin, who is the Chief Information Officer at the Library of Congress. She described the Library of Congress as the “mothership for librarians.” Having standards in our work as librarians is non-negotiable. To be able to speak to those who are directly working on the standards of cataloging, preservation, data collection, and access of library materials that we use daily in the profession was quite inspiring.

One quote that stood out to me during the panel was from James Cheng, Data Analyst at the Library of Congress. “Find and develop your community.” That was one of the main themes that continuously arose for our group throughout the summit.

The Library of Congress actively discusses all things that happen digitally at their institution on their blog called “The Signal”. You can access their blog here.