Open Data Section Editor

We’re very excited to announce that Brianna Marshall is joining our effort to create an open textbook of scholarly communication librarianship, which is currently under advanced contract with ACRL, to be published in 2020. Brianna is the Director of Research Services at the University of California Riverside Libraries and Chair of the ACRL Digital Scholarship Section. She’s generously agreed to serve as the editor of the open data section, a role that she is incredibly qualified to fulfill. We’re excited to bring her considerable expertise, knowledge, and enthusiasm to the project and look forward to working together on creating the best possible resource to support teaching and learning scholarly communication topics, including open data. Brianna kindly authored a post about her involvement, which is shared below. If you see any of us, Josh Bolick, Maria Bonn, Will Cross, and Brianna at ACRL in Cleveland next week, please say “hi”!

Hi all! I am excited to share that I have been asked to step in as editor for the open data section of the forthcoming open textbook on Scholarly Communication.

Many thanks to Josh, Will, and Maria for inviting me to join this project. They’ve laid out a solid outline for the book and I’ve been working closely with them to think through the open data section. As the authors have shared, the end product will be an introductory text intended to be useful to anyone interested in learning about scholarly communication librarianship. Contributing to this vision presents a fun and interesting opportunity. As someone who lamented the dearth of these topics in the LIS curriculum while I was a graduate student, it’s exciting to think of the possible impact that this type of open resource could have. Admittedly, this means that the pressure’s on to create something useful!

As I’ve started to consider the open data section, I’m imagining that it will touch on topics like reproducibility and managing data for re-use, sharing and publishing data, understanding funder mandates, and talking points for working with researchers. To tap into the collective wisdom of librarians who work with open data, I’ll be putting out a call for practitioner-contributed perspectives; Josh, Will, and Maria will be also be soliciting case studies for the book in the summer and early fall. Keep an eye out for more on those calls. For now, I would love to hear your ideas on what to include in the open data section!

  • 1. If you are a current student, what are you most interested in learning about in relation to open data (or open research more broadly)?
  • 2. If you are an instructor, what do you want to make sure your students learn about as they head into the field?
  • 3. And if you are a practitioner, what do you wish you had learned about when you were in graduate school? What do you want to pass along to new librarians and information professionals?

Feel free to tweet me at @notsosternlib or send me a note at briannahmarshall [at] gmail.com. I look forward to hearing from you! -Brianna