Data Librarianship: A Path and an Ethic: A conversation between Thomas Padilla and Vicky Steeves ← dh+lib

"Vicky Steeves is the Librarian for Research Data Management and Reproducibility at New York University – a dual appointment between NYU’s Division of Libraries and Center for Data Science. Vicky contributes to ReproZip, is a co-founder of LIS Scholarship Archive, and developed Women Working in Openness – an effort initiated by April Hathcock. Vicky holds a BS in Computer Science and an MS in Library and Information Science from Simmons College.  

Thomas: I take it that you have a dual appointment in the libraries and an external center. Can you tell us more about your current work? Is your work novel? Might it suggest a model? This work challenges me to think of scholarship more holistically, not just as an article and accompanying data, but as research materials and computational environment.

Vicky: Yes, I’m a dual appointment between the Libraries and the Center for Data Science. It’s exciting because I can flex my computer science muscles, working half time with the Center for Data Science supervised by one of the most badass women in computing around — Juliana Freire (first female chair of the Special Interest Group on the Management of Data for ACM). I contribute to tools like ReproZip that make an immediate impact on researchers. Working with Juliana, Remi Rampin, and Fernando Chirigati, I learn a lot about reproducibility with a particular emphasis on computational reproducibility (for an introduction check out Ben Marwick’s How Computers Broke Science). This work challenges me to think of scholarship more holistically, not just as an article and accompanying data, but as research materials and computational environment. The other half of my time at NYU is spent building the libraries’ data management service with the wonderful Nicholas Wolf. We teach classes in the library and embedded classes for faculty upon request. We also build collections, create resources, and provide consultations for the NYU community. Nick and I only teach with freely available open source tools. This was a purposeful choice. We want students to be able to take what we teach them and be able to use it whether or not they are at NYU. We presented this model at the 2016 LITA forum. I am certainly not the first librarian to have a dual appointment with an outside institute but I think the responsibilities of my job are novel. My job description explicitly requires me to support reproducibility initiatives. I receive a lot of questions from colleagues at other institutions about my role – my successes and failures. I wrote Reproducibility Librarianship, a “from the field” report, for Collaborative Librarianship that describes my day-to-day. The report is meant to be a resource for colleagues who want to fight for resources to support openness, reproducibility, and data management at their institutions. I think having well-resourced staff supporting reproducibility is important for enhancing and preserving the scholarly record.

Thomas: While you have a background in computer science and information science, I’d venture a guess that understanding of these areas doesn’t immediately resolve to some of your current areas of focus. Could you tell us about the path that took you to a career in libraries with this particular area of focus?..."