Librarians in hackathons

Through observation of the teams and their workflows we identified a number of areas which librarians are well suited to support:

Basic Literature Searching

Suprisingly, a number of teams could have benefited from having someone available to search varous types of literature or to support basic research. In one case a team was trying to determine if there was evidence for one approach vs. another approach in the literature. In another, a team spend the first day working on project before discovering that someone else had already created the project and published the results.

Data management

Librarians can provide support for individuals and teams by helping them document their data, select/create metadata standards and README files, and plan for the long term sharing, storage, and preservation of the data they generate in the hackathon.

Finding data

Librarians can help participants find and use open data to test and benchmark their pipelines.

Documentation

Librarians could support documentation. Specifically, aside from helping teams document their code librarians could take an outsiders perspective and help teams document the project, how it can be used, and how it can be extended, so other individuals and teams could use the project in the future.

Open tools

Librarians, especially those involved in supporting computation research and data, often have extensive knowledge of open tools and resources that interested teams could utilize.

Sharing outcomes

At previous NCBI hackathons, librarians have provided support for teams in documenting the outcomes of their projects in journal articles, including editing assistance, advising on citation formats, and submission assistance.