This month was excellent as it marked my first ever professional presentation as a NYU Librarian :)

Last year during NDSR, it seemed like I was giving a presentation at a conference, professional organization meeting, webinar, etc. every other week. It’s been exceptionally restful (well, sort of...) to spend these past 5 months getting to know NYU, my colleagues, the scope of my work, and really just getting a feel for my day-to-day.

One of the most exciting outputs from my first semester here at NYU has surrounded my work on the Moore-Sloan Data Science Environment (msdse.org). Back in October (link to Oct 2015 post), I wrote about the MSDSE Summit that was held at Suncadia Resort in Washington state. God it was so incredibly beautiful there and I got to do some really cool stuff, but the best thing that happened was definitely meeting Jenny Muilenburg and Erik Mitchell.

Read more…

A few weeks ago, I attend the Library Information Technology Association's Forum. Over the 13-15th, I attended several sessions, explored Minneapolis for the first time, and met some really awesome people. I was, as always, a bit nervous attending a new conference but the organizers had some really great 101-type sessions, and even set up a Slack channel which I found to be immensely helpful throughout the day. People organized dinners, discussed sessions in real-time, posed questions, and uploaded some hysterical gifs.

Read more…

This year's Moore/Sloan Data Science Environment was in the beautiful Cascade Mountains at the Suncadia Resort in Cle Elum, Washington.

RT @uwescience: #DSESummit is off to a sunny start! pic.twitter.com/fQi3EZpSdL

— Vicky Steeves (@VickySteeves) October 5, 2015

Look how beautiful that is. Wow.

Read more…

So, for those who don't follow me on Twitter (go ahead though, @VickySteeves), I recently accepted a position at New York University, Division of Libraries and the NYU Center for Data Science, as the Librarian for Research Data Management and Reproducibility. I started August 3rd of this year, which turned out to be great because there were no students around. This may sound bad, but the prep time was invaluable. My partner-in-crime Nick Wolf came two weeks later, and together we really amped up the existing data management LibGuide.

When September rolled around, I was hit with a visual on just how gigantic a school NYU really is. Seeing all the students streaming into the library, I was hit with the scope of my work here. Nick and I were supposed to build up services around research data management/data management planning for literally everyone on campus, from staff to students to faculty. Of course to start we will focus on a few core user communities and build our way out, but just wow--even starting on building services for grad students, for example, is an awesome task.

Read more…

See original posting here.

As the National Digital Stewardship Resident at the American Museum of Natural History, I was introduced to the very specific problems facing museum librarians and archivists not only through observing the Research Library, but by speaking individually with some of the most intensive data creators at the Museum. As a part of my larger needs assessment project at the Museum, I created a semi-structured interview guide that I used to enter into a targeted dialogue with scientific staff members, covering all aspects of their digital research and collections data. Topics included the volume of their data, its rate of growth, format types, necessary software and hardware support, management practices, and opinions on preservation of their data (i.e. what data they believe is important in the long-term). I interviewed close to 60 staff members in total, including all the curators in the five Science divisions at the Museum: Anthropology, Invertebrate Zoology, Paleontology, Physical Sciences, and Vertebrate Zoology.

Read more…