Data, Science, & Librarians,
Oh My!

My thoughts as I navigate the world of data librarianship.

FORCE2016

W.O.W.

So, I kind of am in love with the FORCE conference I just went to. FORCE2016 is the annual conference from an organization called FORCE11 (ha, the year they started the org.). This year, 500 people came from around the world: researchers, librarians, software developers, large scale repositories, open science advocates, and everyone in between. It was not only a very diverse conference in terms of home country and job, but also in the way the conference and program was run.

First, one of the coolest things I have ever seen: in addition to the MULTITUDE of tweets around the event (seriously everyone was so active, it was amazing), they hired a company to take visual notes!! While everything was going on!! Everyone, the gist of their talks, panels, lightning talks, EVERYTHING! Such a great idea and it produced a great visual overview of the con!

Read More →

Getting Use Cases is Hard

One of my big tasks since coming into NYU last August was to work on the ReproZip project. My role is largely outreach and education: I was tasked with teaching ReproZip and general reproducibility principles, gathering use cases in a wider variety of disciplines (when I arrived, the use cases were largely in computer science), and supporting users in general.

ReproZip kind of blew my mind when I arrived; it's an open source software tool that simplifies the process of creating reproducible experiments. Basically it tracks operating system calls and creates a package that contains all the binaries, files, and dependencies required to reproduce the experiment. A reviewer can then extract the experiment on their own machine using ANY operating system (even if it's different from the original one!!) to reproduce the results. As a librarian, I was like "OH MY GOD. THE DIGITAL PRESERVATION GAME JUST GOT UPPED." Anyway, here's basically how ReproZip works -- in 2 steps:

Read More →

#LYD16 Recap

This past week, February 8-12th, was Love Your Data Week!! Is there a more perfect holiday for data librarians, especially right before Valentine's Day??

#LYD16 was a social media event coordinated officially by 27 academic and research institutions, of which both NYU Data Services and NYU Health Sciences Library were a part. The idea behind this social media blitz was to raise awareness of research data management and the support/resources for RDM at each individual institution.

Read More →