The following is excerpted from an invited talk I gave at the Oklahoma State University Library in early April. I’ve embedded the slides below but you can also scroll through for my notes – not the most thorough writeup I’ve ever written but enough to give you a glimpse at my discussion points!
I’d love to hear whether these ideas fit with your experiences with library digital scholarship services, either here in the comments or on Twitter.
I gave a webinar for ACRL’s Digital Curation Interest Group (DCIG) earlier this month! As hard as it always is to give recordings a fresh listen and hear all the times I say umm and so!, what can you do? I had fun and I’m so glad I could share some of my ideas on shaping RDM and digital scholarship services. You can either watch the full recording here or skim my slides below.
I am leading a workshop series this semester! It’s sort of an unexpected development. After I gave my scholarly communication talk I got rather fired up. I had this jolt. Why am I talking about this need and not doing anything about it. It was an eerie moment of responsibility. You see the need. You’re not being asked to do anything about the need. Often, the need is not recognized or valued by others around you. By addressing the need, you’re veering slightly off the path that has been ascribed to you (even though, true, it’s a vague path). You are committing yourself basically to working nights and weekends to make it happen in the way it needs to happen… to not only creating the content and creating the buzz to get people in the door but also to unearthing historic rivalries, the politics of not fitting anywhere, and to ultimately making it happen through whatever charm and perseverance you can muster. None of that changes the fact that you see the need, though. So here I am! Testing some approaches out this semester and seeing what will stick. I’ve got one workshop down, three more to go.
Sidenote: I have been getting a fair number of questions about graphic design lately. I use the free version of Canva to design my posters. This guy was created late one night when inspiration struck. I plan to write a post sometime soon on this topic!
In my quest to finally post and annotate my slate of spring slide decks prior to the fall onslaught, I don’t want to leave out my LYRASIS eGathering talk. It is very near and dear to me as my first invited paid presentation – and my first webinar.
Looking back, I am so appreciative to have had a platform to discuss these ideas. It gave me the opportunity to chat about some of the tips and tricks I’ve picked up from working with Hack Library School and now LITA blog, which I rarely get to do. I also introduced my downloadable blog guide template, which I hope will be useful to anyone working with a group of content creators.
Do you have any ideas about online engagement I should know? I’m so interested in hearing approaches that have worked for other individuals and organizations!
Scholarly communication topics make up a great deal of my personal and professional interests. I’ve rarely gotten to unpack them in my current role, so it was a delight to be asked to speak to around 40-50 of my colleagues at the UW Libraries teaching and learning retreat in early August.
Preparing and giving this talk made me realize that I know a lot more about this area than I thought I did. Sometimes I feel like I live in a bubble where everyone is as wildly intrigued and impassioned as I am. My twitter feed, my listservs: for the most part these expose a world where so many people have my shared interests, and they’re all so darn intimidating and impressive. It’s easy to be in this bubble and to feel like I am just one person in a crowd but during this talk I recognized my responsibility to not shut up. To keep talking about these issues. That yeah, I’m just a newbie librarian but I can use my energy to share ideas that hopefully can have an impact.
During this presentation I heard words come out of my mouth that I didn’t plan for. Words about having empathy for early career researchers, who are in a very different environment than their predecessors, and turning that empathy into library services. Words about being, ahem, not neutral about open research, championing it instead. Words about putting money toward a collections budget that is inclusive of local scholarship that falls beyond a standard peer reviewed article – scholarship that is forgotten at worst and utterly unprioritized at best.
I said in this talk and I’ll write it here again: Nobody knows what they’re doing in this space – and therefore libraries should absolutely be at the forefront of not knowing what we’re doing. Especially if it’s uncomfortable. I didn’t plan on saying that, actually, but the second it slipped out the more true it felt. There are lots of very smart people acting strategically but they are doing things in a trial by fire manner. It’s necessity. Testing, trying, failing, reiterating. The second you think you can halt, you can stop looking ahead, you can stop being proactive – it’s all gone. You are already in a zone where innovation is going to be petrifying to you individually… and that is how culture is created, by all of us bringing forward our reticence or, ideally, our bravery. (One reason why I am all about transparency of failure and rejection: I think it makes us braver and we need oh so much bravery to do the things that matter.)
Although I had slides, a lot of ideas came out off the cuff. I think that’s what I love so much about presenting. It takes work and deep thinking and the creativity of crafting a narrative and plucking the right visuals from the many possible options fuels you. First the delivery crushes you – it’s scary! – but after a few moments you situate yourself chill out a bit and it renews you. It’s this crazy immersive experience. I’ve started to crave it, drifting into a zone where I love the moments I get to lead, teach, and create.
After this talk I dreamed up a digital scholarship series focused on grad students and early career researchers. I’m testing the waters this fall with topics like productivity + project management, crafting a digital identity, research data management + sharing, and an introduction to open research. I am THRILLED but also busy, busy, busy.
with the amazing #LISed15 organizers, from left to right: Alice Mitchell, Sarah Crissinger, Kate Rojas, Madison Sullivan, Jamie Wittenberg, Sveta Stoytcheva, me!, Nicole Helregel.
This is part one, where I share general thoughts on #LISed15. Check out part two to read through an annotated version of my presentation.
I found out about the LIS Ed Symposium in February, when I was contacted by HLS writer Nicole about participating in a keynote talk aimed at bringing together a handful of Hack Library School alumni, namely Micah, Annie, and myself. When I found out I could duck out early from NADDI I was in! I took Friday off, made the drive to Urbana-Champaign, and arrived that afternoon in time to hear reporting back from some of the unconference sessions as well as Emily Weak from Hiring Librarians.
I am awed that this event was organized by just a crew of students, especially as I reflect back on how in my role as SAA student chapter president in library school I organized our small archives conference. I was totally unoriginal. I followed the template set by student chapters in previous years, which was of course very helpful but probably could have used a bit more attention. For whatever reason, I didn’t feel that I could or should deviate from it, though, or at least I was too lazy to. I can’t quite recall my headspace at the time, I just know I went through the motions and didn’t go beyond the basics. And even though I had this template and an awesome group working with me to make it all happen, I remember how stressful it was to wrangle everything.
DH+A! Another great event I was lucky enough to participate in this past spring. The Digital Humanities Research Network was a breath of fresh air for me in my first year at UW as I struggled to connect and find community. I’m excited to be a coordinator for the 2015-2016 academic year, which will allow me to engage in further conversation about libraries and DH.
Rather than embedding images of my slides as I’ve done for other talks, I’ll do a quick and dirty annotation of my main themes. After all, this was a brief 7-minute panel talk. I still want to orient you to the general flow, though, so I’ve added slide numbers corresponding with what I said.
First, hit my audience with some humor: big data is just a fad, isn’t it? [2]
But we’ve got to start talking about it. Good data management prioritizes data that is organized, understandable, and safe. [3-5]
Unfortunately, that’s all a little boring. [6]
As the formats and mediums and platforms and processes by which we create and store and access data change and adapt [7], we don’t always feel like we have the tools [8] at our disposal to deal with it. It’s hard to know where to go next.
Here are a few simple ideas.
We can’t make any more assumptions about young people, those digital natives – we can’t give them all our data and expect that they’ll know what to do with it. We don’t teach anyone in this country how to manage the onslaught of digital information we create, much less the potentially massive and/or otherwise complex data generated in labs. No more giving the grad students the data with no questions asked. No more assumptions. [9]
We have to start the discussion on every level, from the grad student recognizing that perhaps they don’t have the tools yet to the faculty members pressing their department heads for more support to the campus putting resources in this area before we lose ground. And of course the people in roles like mine, bringing energy to a discussion that is, as I mentioned before, not at the top of people’s minds until they’re past the point of no return – their data is lost, utterly without context, or any number of other sad data fates. We have to start the conversation. [10]
For the data creators out there, make a plan, any plan. Make changes and adapt as needed, of course, but don’t be held back by the fact that you feel like you don’t have all the right answers for what to do with your digital stuff. None of us do. You will probably never feel confident. Make a plan and stick with it. [11]
And then comes the fun part, because with effective data management you get to do some pretty cool stuff. You can explore it, open it up, and make it beautiful in any number of ways. [12-14]
with co-panelists Annie Pho (seated) and Micah Vandegrift (virtual)
Part two of my reflections on #LISed15 focuses on my presentation. To read my overall thoughts, go to part one.
I’ll cut to the chase: here are my slides if you’d like to quickly page through them.
I also wanted to annotate them a bit, though, given that they are so driven by visuals that might not be terribly easy to interpret. I should note that our panel was recorded, so obviously that will be the version of record as far as what I actually said. But given the chance to make that delivery more elegant here and now I will gladly take advantage! I’m also going intersperse tweets from the event throughout, my very own haphazardly cobbled together storify. FYI, tweets stolen from the actual legit #LISed15 storify.
This year (several months ago, ahem) I presented at the Research Data Access & Preservation Summit, held in nearby Minneapolis. I led a panel focused on different RDM collaboration and service models at institutions. I was joined by Cynthia Hudson-Vitale from Washington University in St. Louis and Amy Nurnberger from Columbia University. Our abstract:
Research data services is not just a library issue. Experience and scholarship has shown that given the complex nature of research data services, various units and departments across an institution must work together to provide appropriate services. One component of the solution is to form a research data services advisory committee or working group. This panel will focus on the various organizational structures in place at different institutions, addressing change management /transition issues and roles this committee may play.
If you’d like to breeze through my slides, here they are:
But like I’ve done with other slide decks, I thought I would also annotate what I covered in my talk to make it more understandable.
I am zooming headlong into the fog of library conference season. I’m doubtful that I’ll be anything but on autopilot for the next month and a half, starting this month for ACRL and ending with the LYRASIS eGathering in May. With this in mind I thought I’d share some of the recent talks I’ve given before heading into the next round!
Wayyy back in December I gave a talk at the UW Digital Humanities Research Network, one of the more inspiring groups I’ve found myself involved with on campus. I never get bored of talking about data management 101. It’s one of those topics that I think gets breezed over because people assume it’s too basic or already known but no – it’s the bread and butter. I’m convinced that everyone, myself included, needs a reminder about these concepts every six months! I was also excited because this was the very first slide deck where I included an image of a scrapbook layout (my data).
Last month my student assistant Elliott and I gave a talk in SLIS about data curation stuff. You know, this talk made me a little sad. We marketed specifically and heavily toward SLIS students and had two show up (plus a librarian and a professor). I mean, SLIS promoted it, Dorothea and Bronwen promoted to their classes; what else can be done? I feel bad griping because we had two students show up and I’m not trying to undervalue their presence. I was just underwhelmed. And can I be real and say I was a little annoyed? I came in with a thousand and one ideas about how I could work with current students, open doors for them the way doors were opened for me… and I’ve found that excitement quashed repeatedly.
Most recently, I presented as part of the RDS Holz brown bag series. This series was dormant for a while but we brought it back this spring. Attendance to these talks, too, has been dire. In particular, I thought that this talk, which brought together an associate university librarian plus two established librarians – would draw a broader audience. Sigh. The slides I link to below are just my portion of the talk on open data; you can find the complete slides in MINDS@UW.