This award supports the development of a biological informatics masters degree program for Scientific Communication Specialists (SCS). Unlike most existing educational programs in bioinformatics, the SCS program takes a broad view of biology and informatics to train professionals to bridge arenas of information technology development in the biological sciences. Based at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the program is building on a long-standing, top-rated masters of science in library and information science and a digital library certificate of advanced study program, and ongoing information technology research initiatives in biodiversity, neuroscience, and genomics. The objectives of the project are to develop curriculum, establish internships, integrate course work with informatics research, share the educational approach, and expand understanding of the role of informatics in scientific progress.
The SCS program is aimed at making progress toward the problem of "getting past the prototype" by educating information professionals responsible for the implementation, evaluation, continual improvement, sustainability, and integration of information and data systems about biology. SCS professionals are trained to exploit existing data standards and work toward "long-lived data" and interoperability, and to build and integrate the increasing number of digital libraries, repositories, indexing systems, ontologies, taxonomies, vocabularies, and tools associated with digital data and products. The impacts of SCS education include functional applications that are integrated with current scientific practice and greater attention to standards development, data curation, data and literature federation, and equitable dissemination of research results.
