Since 2013, I serve as Data Librarian for the New Brunswick
Libraries, part of Rutgers University
Libraries. Prior to this, I was
Data and Economics Librarian, and prior to that, Business and Economics
Librarian. Since 1999, I have been a member of the library faculty of
Rutgers University-New Brunswick. I
was granted tenure and promoted to the rank of Librarian II in 2005. In
2019, I was promoted to the rank of Librarian I (equivalent to Full
Professor). I hold an M.A. in Economics from the University of
Pennsylvania, an M.S. in Library Science from the University of North
Carolina-Chapel Hill, and an M.S. in Statistics and Biostatistics from
Rutgers University-New Brunswick.
As Data Librarian for Rutgers-New Brunswick, I am responsible for Data Services,
including outreach and training for data, assisting students and faculty, acquisition of data sources, development of research guides, and
providing support for quantitative research across a range of
disciplines. I led the development of the Graduate Specialist Program, hiring Rutgers-NB graduate students to teach workshops and provide consultations in advanced research methods, including Python, R, and other data science topics. I am serving from 2022 to 2025 as the Head of the New Brunswick Libraries Research Services Unit. I am particularly interested in developing and supporting data literacy and statistical literacy.
I am the subject specialist for and liaison to the Department of
Economics, and the Department of
Agricultural, Food, and Resource Economics.
I manage the Libraries’ collections, give instructional sessions, and
help researchers and students locate information in these disciplines. I am also the New Brunswick Libraries Point of Contact for Government Documents and Statistical Data Services.
Some occasional thoughts about data and other things are at my blog here. I also maintain the Libraries research guide for
Data and for Economics.
A current focus for me is the development of useful guides to data and statistical resources related to Mongolia and the countries of Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan).
The Central Asia and Mongolia Gender Data Portal (CAMGDP) exemplifies this.
Scholarship
This page highlights major publications. See the CV links above for
complete and current publication details.
Ryan Womack, “The Orientation and Training of New Librarians for
Business Information”, Journal of Business and Finance
Librarianship, volume 13, issue 3, 2008, pp. 217-226. Preprint in
RUcore
Mei Ling Lo, Li Sun, Ryan Womack, Connie Wu, and Tao Yang.
“Celebrating Diversity, Welcoming the World: Developing Chinese
Webpages at Rutgers University Libraries”, 2009. CALA Occasional
Papers Series, no. 5, June 2009.
Ryan Womack (Editor), Success by the Numbers: Statistics for
Business Development. Chicago: Reference and User Services
Association of the American Library Association, 2005. (RUSA
Occasional Paper, number 28).
Ryan Womack, “High Speed, High Price, High Demand: Business Internet
Resources and Databases in American Academic Libraries”,
Proceedings of Central Asia 2002: Internet and Library, Information
Resources in Science, Culture, Education, and Business, Bukhara,
Uzbekistan, October 2002, pp. 37-41.
Selected Presentations
“The Central Asia and Mongolia Gender Data Portal”, IASSIST Annual Conference, Philadelphia, PA, May 31, 2023. More information
“Addressing Diversity in Data through the work of Graduate Specialists”, IASSIST Annual Conference (Hybrid), Gothenburg, Sweden, June 8, 2022.
“From Pilot to JetStream: Building training pathways and collaboration in data science and digital humanities through the Library”, IASSIST Annual Conference (Virtual), May 20, 2021. (postponed from 2020 due to COVID-19). Short, Medium, and Long versions of the talk.
“Big Data, Data Visualization, and Reproducible Research”, Mongolian University of Science and Technology, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, May 12, 2017.
“Data in Libraries: Data Processing and Visualization”, Reference and User Services Association of the American Library Association, online, , May 4, 2017 [repeated November 2, 2017].
“Putting Reproducibility into Practice: Workflows and Case Studies”, Rutgers Workshop on Reproducibility in Experimental and Computational Science, Piscataway, NJ, October 10, 2016.
“(a bit about) Data Visualization”], ICPSR Biennial Meeting, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, October 2, 2015.
“Data Literacy for All, with
R”, IASSIST Annual
Conference, Lawrence, Kansas, May 23, 2017 [repeated May 29, 2018
IASSIST Annual Conference, Montréal, Canada].
Ryan Womack, “Hands-On Big
Data”, IASSIST Annual
Conference, Minneapolis, Minnesota, June 2, 2015.
“Data Visualization and
R”, IASSIST
Annual Conference, Cologne, Germany, May 29, 2013 [repeated June 3,
2014, IASSIST Annual Conference, Toronto, Canada].
R workshops at Rutgers are offered to students and faculty across
the University, from a wide range of science and social science
departments. Topics include statistical functions, graphics, data
manipulation, data visualization, time series, and survival
analysis. See my R page for
workshop materials.
Service
I am an active member of IASSIST (the
International Association for Social Science Information Service and
Technology). I served as Member at Large for the USA from 2019 to 2023, and as Secretary of the Association from 2015 to 2019.
On the national level, I was once active in the Business Reference and
Services Section (BRASS) of the American Library
Association, including a term as Chair.
See my CV for further details of local activity.
CalyxOS Well, it is not really anyone’s fault but Google’s. Yet we expect Google to be evil, so their removal of side-loading (a.k.a., being able to install the apps you want) and access to preview releases is not so surprising. However, this has caused CalyxOS to do something akin to suspending their operations. While they claim that they are doing this for security reasons and will return, it still means that they are out of action for several months.Read more...
Enshittification has rapidly become enshrined as a fundamental principle of the economy of the internet. Once customers are hooked on various free and enhanced services funded by excess capital, the screws are turned and customers are bled as the service is monetized by reducing costs and quality.
Now that it’s happened to me, it’s become personal.
I was a Gandi customer for over 20 years, since my first ventures onto the internet with web hosting, still discoverable via the Wayback Machine (although I won’t give any further clues than that).Read more...
As I mentioned in my last blog post, I am trying to broaden my knowledge and secure my web assets by learning a bit more about other services and migrating sites there, after realizing that it is perhaps not wise to remain reliant on AWS.
This is a quick commentary on services that I learned about and tried (this post is one source of information). My needs are simple. All my sites are static, with mail hosting and any other services taken care of elsewhere.Read more...
