Syracuse iSchool’s Jian Qin presents on eScience panel in Denver

Syracuse University School of Information Studies (iSchool) Associate Professor Jian Qin was featured on the “Next Generation Science Librarianship Panel,” hosted by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Library in Boulder, Colo., on Nov. 17, 2010.

Qin joined NCAR Special Projects Librarian Jamaica Jones and assistant professor and director of the Engineering and Math-Physics Libraries at the University of Colorado at Boulder Jack Maness to highlight solutions in developing skills and products appropriate for the application of distributed computer networking and processing capabilities.

The three panelists come from different types of libraries and librarianship education and engaged in a discussion about the needed skill set, project designs and service approaches for successful information resource management solutions that support scientists’ research efforts.

Qin works with the Institute of Museum and Library Services-funded eScience Librarianship, a three-year effort to train an initial cohort of librarians with the skills needed to work along researchers in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics fields. Jones is involved with OpenSky, an institutional repository that has helped the NCAR library to expand its capability to support the institution’s role in providing facilities, research, models, and tools that advance atmospheric and geoscience on a global scale. Maness has recently worked with two ethnographic studies that identified several “personas” that librarians can use while making decisions about the content and functionality needed in institutional repositories and data archives.

Qin has been a Library and Information Science (LIS) professor for nearly 15 years, researching and teaching in the areas of knowledge modeling and organization, ontologies, metadata, web content management and scientific communication. Her recent publications based on this research have appeared in the journals Library Metadata, American Society for Information Science & Technology, and Scholarly Publishing. Her 2008 book “Metadata,” coauthored with Marcia Zeng, serves as the definitive textbook for learning about and applying metadata in diverse information organization and representation contexts.

In the past four years she has served as principal investigator on projects funded by both the National Science Foundation and the Institute of Museum and Library Services related to science information skill education to prepare professionals for the digital age. She earned a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, an MSLIS from University of Western Ontario, and a B.A. from Wuhan University in China.