Libraries can be catalysts for translational research

It's an open secret that most major academic health centers are lagging in providing their researchers with state of the art knowledge in the computational techniques required to analyze data sets with tens of thousands of variables. The exponential growth of the generation of these data sets over the last decade has far outstripped the ability of the average post-doctoral student to analyze them. With the advent of libraries whose curatorial taste and reference expertise now extends to vast biomedical data sets and their analysis, we are well positioned to catalyze the diffusion of bioinformatics expertise through the research community. One such example is heralded here at the Harvard Clinical and Translational Science Center.