The Library Big Data Research: Status and Directions

Libraries are widely used by government, universities, research institutes, and the public since they are storing and managing intellectual assets. The library information directly stored in libraries and about the people interaction with libraries can be transformed into accessible data which then will be used by researchers to help library better serve users. Librarians need to understand how to transform, analyze, and present data in order to facilitate such knowledge creation. For example, the challenges they face include how to make big datasets more useful, visible and accessible. Fortunately, with new and powerful analytics of big data, such as information visualization tools, researchers/users can look at data in new ways and mine it for information they intend to have. Moreover, interaction of users and stored information has been taken into librarian's consideration to improve library service quality. In this work, the authors discuss the characteristics of datasets in library and argue against a popular confusion that data involved in library research is not big enough, conduct a review for the research work on library big data and then summarize the applications and research directions in this field. The status of big data research in library in China is discussed. The challenges associated with it are also discussed and explored.