March 6, 2018

Last month, the Drexel University Libraries participated in the third annual Love Data Week event.

Love Data Week – formerly known as Love Your Data Week – is an annual social media event that “[raises] awareness and [builds] a community to engage on topics related to research data management, sharing, preservation, reuse, and library-based research data services.”

Over the course of the week-long event (held February 12 - February 16), universities, organizations, researchers and others who just love data shared practical tips, resources and stories to help researchers use good data practices.

The theme for the 2018 event was “Data Stories,” and Drexel Libraries staff took to Twitter to share their own tales of using data and to connect with research and data management resources from their peers.

“’Love Data Week’ is a great opportunity for data specialists and librarians like me to promote what we’re doing and to educate each other about the importance and usefulness of data,” said Jay Bhatt, Drexel’s liaison librarian for engineering and an energetic participant in Love Data Week. “During the week, I tweeted some of the research from the College of Engineering, like Dr. Andrew Cohen’s collection of time-lapse image sequences of living organelles, cells and tissue. I also followed along with the “conversation” all week, so I was learning at the same time. It gave me a chance to learn more about data management tools like ShareDB and to see what other librarians and universities are doing to support data management on campus.”

The Libraries also coordinated with Drexel’s College of Computing & Informatics (CCI) to host a Love Data Week-themed Metadata Mixer: Challenges and Opportunities for Sharing Sensitive Data: Metadata Solutions and Licensing Considerations. Bhatt was a guest speaker at the event, and he shared tips and information on using Figshare as a research and data management tool. Jane Greenberg, Director of the Metadata Research Center at CCI, and Sam Grabus, a Drexel CCI PhD student, ended the mixer with an update on their NSF spoke project, A Licensing Model and Ecosystem for Data Sharing, which seeks to facilitate the data sharing process for sensitive and private data between industry, academia, and government.

Later that week, the Libraries also welcomed Steve Melly, Geographic Information System (GIS) Specialist for the Drexel Urban Health Collaborative, to an internal Libraries staff event. Professor Melly spoke to Libraries staff about the various online data visualization and mapping tools available to Drexel, including the ESRI GIS Mapping Software.

“Love Data week provided a platform for data enthusiasts from on campus and from around the world to connect with each other through research and data management-related events and social media posts,” Bhatt added. “It was really exciting to see people from different organizations – even people who aren’t involved in any research – talking about data.”

Have questions about data management resources and tools? Contact your liaison librarian for more information on how the Libraries can help.