Information scientists coordinate and make data accessible in various settings, such as universities, hospitals, and businesses. They study data and find ways to make it useful and accessible. Most work with electronic data and focus on information management. Their tasks vary but require technological know-how and a firm understanding of applied sciences and data management practices.
An information scientist is a professional whose primary job is to coordinate information and make data accessible. Information scientists work in a wide variety of work settings. Some act as research librarians at universities, while others assist medical staff in hospitals or doctors’ offices. An information scientist can work for company executives trying to understand employee data or for employees looking for highly specific information. Although the work is different in different disciplines, what information scientists actually do in each is similar. The scientist’s job, no matter the setting, is to study data, raw statistics, and information stores and find ways to make them useful and accessible to a certain class of people.
Today, most information scientists work predominantly with electronic data. The advent of the Internet and the ability to archive information online has made many tasks more efficient, but it has also generated significantly more data. When everything is stored, everything is there. It’s usually much harder to find something unobtrusive when there’s so much to sift through.
In many ways, the information scientist’s job resembles that of an information scientist on computers. Both computer and information scientists spend most of their day at a computer looking at network data and finding answers in computer network patterns. An information scientist studies this information for external purposes, however, which is generally not the case for computer scientists. Much of an information scientist’s job involves crossing the road between statistical science and the uses of technology in everyday life and business operations. Many tasks are directly related to people and discovering innovative solutions to complex questions generated by users.
There is no single information scientist job description and no set list of information scientist tasks. However, the papers maintain some consistency across disciplines. One of the key roles played by the information scientist is the information manager. The scientist must study the information of a company and understand where it is being generated, the frequency of generation and where it is going.
The scientist will then create a management structure to leverage this information and make it more useful to the organism that generated it. In this way, the scientist is taking the science and rubrics of statistics and data analysis and applying them to real information management situations. The scientist is not just finding solutions, but implementing them as well.
Some information scientists focus on rationalizing corporate financial data, while others look for ways to generate a clearer picture of bandwidth usages over time. A medical information scientist is concerned with making data related to medical records, prescription drug information, and physician training records available to hospitals, licensing boards, and medical professionals. In library settings, information scientists help users quickly locate relevant parts of needed texts. All of these tasks require technological know-how and a firm understanding of applied sciences and data management practices.
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