I recently returned from a trip to Washington DC, where I had a chance to see a really interesting session at the 97th Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research. The topic was caBIG, an ambitious attempt by the National Cancer Institute to build an infrastructure to support data exchange among bioinformaticists.

Modern science is growing ever more data-intensive — a researcher using a DNA microarray is often looking at expression changes for hundreds of genes at once. Getting the data is the easier part of the equation: testing it, normalizing it and figuring out what it all means in the context of the literature is the fun bit.

So where do libraries fit in all this? It’s interesting to note that one of the main areas of caBIG research involves the question of vocabularies and ontologies, an area where we can claim some expertise. The University of Illinois School of Library and Information Science is now offering a Concentration in Bioinformatics. Closer to home, the Countway Library at Harvard Medical School recently reorganized, placing bioinformatics at the forefront of its efforts.

I realize that a lot of this falls outside of our comfort zone. After all, our focus has always been more on the dissemination of digested knowledge than that of raw data. But if our fundamental job is to to support the efforts of our researchers (and I mean the term in its broadest sense, from report-writing fifth graders to high-energy physicists), then this is a area we need to explore.

There has been a lot of talk throughout the biblioblogosphere to the effect that more librarians need to be coders. As always, there’s some question of how much this meme has percolated through the wider community, so to summarize:

Most librarians don’t know much about programming, and this lack has contributed to an online user experience that is a lot less interactive and useful than it should be.

And I think in many ways this is right on target.
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