Description
Citizen science (CS) as the tool engaging people in scientific projects has a great potential for strengthening valuable relationships between academic community and public, democratization of science, building new specific competencies on both sides and supporting the values of civil society. Just now Slovakia, Central European country, is starting to discover its potential. Academic libraries have a unique position to promote CS. All over the world, many academic libraries take on the role of citizen science centers. The benefits include adding an attractive reason to visit the library, opportunities to gain new skills, networking library staff with scholarly community, increasing visibility and impact of library activities. The Slovak Centre of Scientific and Technical Information as a national research library opens the gate to promoting and developing CS in our country. To accelerate CS evolution in Slovakia, we developed the first MOOC course to enable everyone to learn cornerstones of citizen science. The course, hosted on the EU-Citizen.Science moodle platform, consists of five sections: the concept of CS, how to design CS project, how to find partners, data and ethics issues and CS projects impact. All information is available in Slovak. We find the language issue important due to high diversity of knowledge and English proficiency in different groups taking part in CS projects. The course is supplemented by videos where CS projects representatives share their experience and good practice. We aim to address research librariansin Slovakia to increase awareness on CS, discuss its potential within theirinstitutions and prepare the background for a national platform to offer more information on CS and enable participation in CS projects running in Slovakia. Our CS skills training brings opportunity to encourage collaboration, create bridges among groups across society and make research libraries active centers of CS development in Slovakia.
Included in
Citizen Science education in Slovak research library: case study from Central Europe
Citizen science (CS) as the tool engaging people in scientific projects has a great potential for strengthening valuable relationships between academic community and public, democratization of science, building new specific competencies on both sides and supporting the values of civil society. Just now Slovakia, Central European country, is starting to discover its potential. Academic libraries have a unique position to promote CS. All over the world, many academic libraries take on the role of citizen science centers. The benefits include adding an attractive reason to visit the library, opportunities to gain new skills, networking library staff with scholarly community, increasing visibility and impact of library activities. The Slovak Centre of Scientific and Technical Information as a national research library opens the gate to promoting and developing CS in our country. To accelerate CS evolution in Slovakia, we developed the first MOOC course to enable everyone to learn cornerstones of citizen science. The course, hosted on the EU-Citizen.Science moodle platform, consists of five sections: the concept of CS, how to design CS project, how to find partners, data and ethics issues and CS projects impact. All information is available in Slovak. We find the language issue important due to high diversity of knowledge and English proficiency in different groups taking part in CS projects. The course is supplemented by videos where CS projects representatives share their experience and good practice. We aim to address research librariansin Slovakia to increase awareness on CS, discuss its potential within theirinstitutions and prepare the background for a national platform to offer more information on CS and enable participation in CS projects running in Slovakia. Our CS skills training brings opportunity to encourage collaboration, create bridges among groups across society and make research libraries active centers of CS development in Slovakia.