VICKY STEEVES (Posts about Professional Life)

Visiting CERN

Vicky Steeves — Sat, 22 Oct 2016 18:08:25 GMT

A few weeks ago, my NDSR cohort & I had the great opportunity to present our paper at iPres 2016 in Bern, Switzerland! This was my first ever peer reviewed paper and it was accepted! Not a bad first time 😁. Our presentation went really well -- there was good audience engagement and it seemed like there was real potential for people to extend or use our study (with all our open access data!). One of my favourite moments was right after our presentation, when an audience member (whose name escapes me, I'm so sorry if you're reading this!) told us that we were part of very few people he'd seen accurately use grounded theory. I doubt this is true, but it was flattering nonetheless.

SHARE Week

Vicky Steeves — Sat, 30 Jul 2016 18:08:25 GMT

This week I made my first trek down to Virginia to engage with the Center for Open Science IRL! After just about a year of emails, hangouts, and calls, I was excited to see the space in which I think some really innovative tech is being developed for the open X community. The second week of July was designated as SHARE week: Monday and Tuesday was the SHARE hackathon, Wednesday and half of Thursday was the SHARE community meeting, and the last half of Thursday and Friday was the SHARE Curation Associates kick off orientation.

So. Many. Conferences.

Vicky Steeves — Sun, 15 May 2016 18:08:25 GMT

My first two weeks of May have been just explicitly devoted to conferences. Planning, executing, attending, surveying -- you name it, I've been doing it in relation to some event or another. It's actually been great, but so exhausting. I am definitely giving a lot of props to event planners for doing this as their day-to-day.

FORCE2016

Vicky Steeves — Wed, 20 Apr 2016 18:08:25 GMT

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!

Getting Use Cases is Hard

Vicky Steeves — Sun, 20 Mar 2016 18:08:25 GMT

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:

#LYD16 Recap

Vicky Steeves — Tue, 16 Feb 2016 18:08:25 GMT

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.

Although just under 30 institutions officially were a part of the team, MANY MORE ended up joining the conversation on social media and jumping in, sharing their own thoughts and resources. We saw input from commercial organizations, researchers, faculty members, librarians, non-profits, and even academic journals! It was really great to see a conversation started around data stewardship and the importance of loving your data as much as it loves you!

Goals for 2016 and How I'll Make Them Happen

Vicky Steeves — Fri, 15 Jan 2016 18:08:25 GMT

If you've been following this blog for a while, or even took a quick look on my resume page, you'll see I haven't been at my position at NYU for very long. January 3rd marks the fifth month (to the day!) that I've been NYU's official "Research Data Management and Reproducibility Librarian." There was a bit of an adjustment period where I just spent the majority of my time introducing myself to my colleagues, getting to know what my daily workflow would look like, and brainstorm with Nick about what our services will look like, some good groups for targeted outreach, and what classes we are going to teach as a part of Data Services typical course offerings.

This was all well and good, but since I started in August I missed the goal-setting timeline that is typical for my colleagues. As such, I wanted to make some, and my supervisor in the library thought it would be a good way to measure growth besides. Plus, since I'm pretty early career, setting goals for a measurable outcome was kind of new for something not project based. This was just trying to assess my own growth, not necessarily the growth of a project I'm working on.

Presenting at CNI

Vicky Steeves — Wed, 16 Dec 2015 18:08:25 GMT

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.

My First LITA

Vicky Steeves — Fri, 20 Nov 2015 18:08:25 GMT

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.

Moore-Sloan Data Science Environment Summit: A Recap

Vicky Steeves — Sat, 10 Oct 2015 18:08:25 GMT

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.