Introduction and background

Having worked in academic libraries for more than 25 years, I have observed many changes in library services and support. I was educated at the Royal School of Library and Information Science in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1994 as a librarian, but, during my education, I never heard any of my otherwise great teachers talk about ‘the Internet’. While in school, I focused on topics like Information Policies, EU Copyright Policies, Scholarly Communications and Information Searching and Retrieval. For the majority of my career, I have supported and trained students and faculty with their scholarly and education needs. My work focuses on user support, information literacy, outreach, training and teaching. This has taken many forms ranging from an introduction to HTML in the late 1990s to information retrieval, reference management, systematic reviews and open science issues in recent years.

The transformation from dealing with paper-based materials 25 years ago to dealing with electronic, digital and online access has resulted in a shift in the skills needed in libraries. Fortunately, libraries around the world have always embraced that change. The focus on skills needed for moving from paper to digital access are similar to the needs for data services in libraries today. The re-skilling and up-skilling needed to deal with data-related questions requires both data librarians and ‘front desk’ colleagues with just enough expertise to engage with what is actually being asked (Rice and Southall, 2016, 16). Front desk librarians need to be able to place a data reference question in the right context and help point the patron in the right direction. Not everyone working in todays research workflow.s academic libraries will become a data expert, but having the awareness and motivation to learn new data skills and place them in the right context is crucial. A learning mindset is essential.

In the late 1990s, the library management at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) Library made a bold decision. DTU stopped subscribing to printed journal collections and began building a digital collection, almost from one day to the next (Butler, 1999). At the same time, the library management simultaneously launched an in-house skills project (Project JULIA) requiring every employee to acquire the digital skills needed to be ready for the future.