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.. title: Goals for 2016 and How I'll Make Them Happen
.. slug: goals-for-2016
.. date: 2016-01-15 14:08:25 UTC-04:00
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.. link: https://github.com/VickySteeves/personal-website/blob/master/posts/2016-jan15.html
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<p class="blog-post-meta">January 15, 2016 by <a href="../../resume.html">Vicky
Steeves</a></p>
<p>If you've been following this blog for a while, or even took a quick look on my
<a href="../../resume.html">resume</a> 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 <a href="http://nmwolf.net/">Nick</a> about what our <a href=
"http://guides.nyu.edu/data_management/services">services</a> will look like, some good
groups for targeted outreach, and what <a href=
"http://guides.nyu.edu/DS_classes">classes</a> we are going to teach as a part of
<a href="http://guides.nyu.edu/c.php?g=277095&amp;p=1848849">Data Services typical
course offerings</a>.</p>
<p>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.</p><!-- TEASER_END -->
<p>In the end, I made 7 goals for this 2015-2016 academic year:</p>
<ol>
<li><span class="c1">Research</span>: Currently I'm involved in a few different
research projects, all collaborations, across three different domains/topics. I'd
really like to finalize and publish at least one of these projects this year into a
peer-reviewed, academic journal.</li>
<li>Reproducibility as Research: I would also like to look at reproducibility more
specifically as a research target area. I am really interested in learning more about
reproducibility and possible applications or crossover with library services.</li>
<li><span class="c1">Teaching Me How to Teach</span>: I would love to learn more
about teaching and pedagogical theory, as its own entity. While I have certainly
taught before, I've never attended classes or the like on the actual practice of
instruction, evaluating instruction, active teaching, diversity in instruction, etc.
I think that I would benefit from taking some workshops on teaching. I'm going to
attend at least three of these sessions by the end of the academic year at a
minimum.</li>
<li><span class="c1">Multimedia Instruction/Outreach</span>: I'm super interested in
making short, two-to-five minute videos outlining tools that could be of use in
managing data, such as the <a href="https://osf.io">Open Science Framework</a>,
<a href="https://www.openicpsr.org/">Open ICPSR</a>, converting files to archival
formats, etc. I think a varied approach to disseminating RDM information would get us
some more love. I would like to complete two of these "how-to" videos by the end of
this academic year.</li>
<li><span class="c1">Build Up the Curriculum</span>: I want to expand instructional
offerings from three classes a semester to six classes a semester at a minimum,
starting in the spring 2016 semester. Approaching the entire RDM lifecycle in one
class can be overwhelming to some first-time users. By offering classes that
separately address each aspect of the RDM lifecycle (i.e. data creation, data
documentation, etc.) it allows for a more in-depth and digestible delivery of
information.</li>
<li><span class="c1">Targeted Outreach</span>: I want to incorporate some more
relationship building into my daily workflow. I think that by entering a 1-1 dialogue
with certain users would help to disseminate information on RDM services at NYU, and
hopefully start a dialogue about RDM and reproducibility leading to some action items
within the target group. By the end of this academic year, I will choose one
department to make direct inroads with and speak 1-1 with the faculty members of that
department.</li>
<li><span class="c1">Improving the <a href=
"http://guides.nyu.edu/data_management">Libguide</a></span>: I'm really interesting
in building up a corpus of online knowledge base through expanding the LibGuide as
much as possible. To accomplish this, every Friday I plan on setting aside an hour to
update the LibGuide and add instructional and informational offerings.</li>
</ol>
<hr>
<p>I have a twofold method to keeping these goals in order and make sure I "get 'er
done" (ew sorry for this). The first one is more for the collaborative projects I've
listed under these goals, and that's the <a href="https://osf.io">Open Science
Framework</a>(OSF) I mentioned under goal #4.</p>
<p>The OSF is a <em>FREE</em> tool created by the non-profit, the <a href=
"https://cos.io/">Center for Open Science</a>, to integrate with resarchers' daily
workflows. Besides allowing for maximum control over data access (with really robust
controls for creating labs/collaborators on specific projects, and even more
granularly, specific components of specific projects), the OSF helps people document
and archive materials from all parts of the research data lifecycle, from study design
to data to publication. What's also great is that the OSF is completely open source,
which means there is an <a href="https://osf.io/y9jdt/">API</a> and <a href=
"https://osf.io/getting-started/#addons">lots of addon features</a> that you can use.
My favourites are the Google Drive and GitHub addon (probably because I use it the
most), but it also has integration with Amazon S3, Box, Dataverse, Dropbox, Figshare,
OSF Storage, Mendeley, and Zotero.</p><img src="../../images/osf_DS.png" alt=
"OSF Projects" height="85%" width="85%">
<p class="caption">All my projects listed on OSF, with Nick as my collaborator on
almost all.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.nmwolf.net/">Nick</a> and I use the OSF for all our projects for
Team RDM in Data Services. We use it to track files in each of our individual,
NYU-Google Drive accounts, link in code that we write from our respective GitHubs, and
keep metrics open for our public projects as a great boost to our reviews. It's been
really useful, also because of the integrated Wiki feature that lets us keep robust
to-do lists for each other/our team and allows gives us a space to document explicitly
what we have been doing, how we've been doing it, how we are disseminating information,
and how we are maintaining all the different aspects of our RDM outreach and
instructional work.</p>
<p>Plus, it's a standardized markup so we can do some cool strikethrough effects and
style it like any other Wiki page. As someone who lives for striking out tasks, this
was honestly one little tiny feature I just absolutely adored.</p><img src=
"../../images/osf_ToDo.png" alt="OSF Projects" height="85%" width="85%">
<p class="caption">Nick and I are super productive, as you can see ;)</p>
<p>The second one is strangely analog. I always make a plan in my <a href=
"http://passionplanner.com">Passion Planner</a> to make sure I keep my behind in gear
and keep a big picture focus of all the things I want to get done before August 2016.
I'm a proud member of the #PashFam on <a href=
"https://www.facebook.com/thepassionplanner/">Facebook</a> and <a href=
"https://www.instagram.com/passionplanner">Instagram</a>, and using my Passion Planner
I've definitely kept up with a lot of goals that may or may not have previously fallen
to the wayside. It just has a great interface to goal tracking and accountability that
has helped me refine my focus professionally and personally.</p><img src=
"../../images/jan20_planner.jpg" alt="Passion Planer" height="85%" width="85%">
<p class="caption">Look at all the crossed-off goals and "to-do's!"</p>
<p>Plus, Passion Planner has really great inspiration quotes on each page, along with a
&ldquo;Good Things That Happened&rdquo; section each week for me to fill out. As a
generally negative person, I genuinely feel like this helped to keep me positive and
less bogged down in my anxiety. The paper is super thick also so I like to draw with my
multi-colored pens to make everything seem just that little bit better.</p>
<p>Passion Planner works for me because it's not only a place to keep my schedule, but
also a place to doodle, journal, write notes, and do some short and long-term goal
setting activities complete with weekly to-do-lists and monthly check-ins. Each week
and day have a "Focus" section, where you write in your focus for that week, and then
each individual day. As someone who loves to multitask but also loves to plan (almost
obsessively loves to plan) this has kept me super on-track for getting things done,
especially since there are separate to-do lists on each week for my personal and
professional life. I'm kind of obsessed with it. I have like 3 of these in the wings
for when I finish this one. What's cool is you can also <a href=
"http://www.passionplanner.com/downloads/">download it for free</a> as a
pdf!</p><img src="../../images/passion_planner.png" alt="Passon Planner" height="85%"
width="85%">
<p class="caption">Image from <a href=
"http://www.passionplanner.com/what-is-it/">Passion Planner website</a></p>
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