The ability to work well with data is understood to be an increasingly crucial skill as universities aim to preserve, sort and discover information that emerges from research.

But several studies, revealed here at the annual meeting of the Coalition for Networked Information, suggest that higher education has so far fallen short of preparing research faculty and university information workers to handle those tasks. An ethnographic study of 23 faculty members, postdoctoral fellows, graduate students and other researchers, conducted by the anthropologists Lori Jahnke and Andrew ...