Scholarship recipient reflections on RDAP 2025 - Xing Jian

2025-04-17 11:09 AM | Daria Orlowska (Administrator)

As a PhD in chemistry, my route to the RDAP Summit was not straightforward. With academic activities in biochemistry and molecular biology, I had a scientist job in a biobank for two years. In early 2024, I joined the Research Service team in the Bernard Becker Medical Library at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis as a senior support scientist. The RDAP 2024 Summit provided me with a quick overview of the field and a networking opportunity. The main benefit was helping me quickly adapt to a new environment. After one year experience as a data management and sharing consultant, as well as a manager of our institutional repository, I gained much deeper appreciation of the various sessions in the RDAP 2025 Summit. Hopefully, the new knowledge will translate into more efficient work.

Without formal librarianship training, it is important for me to know many data service resources. I collected a resource list during the Summit and would like to share it with scientists who recently entered the Research Data Access and Preservation field.

  1. The new RDAP LinkedIn page. One way to support RDAP is to follow the page and share posts with your LinkedIn circle.

  2. The RDAP Discuss listserv. The listserv community is an important resource for information related to data service.

  3. Research Data Alliance (RDA). Joining RDA’s individual membership gives one opportunity to work with others around the world to develop and adopt infrastructure that promotes data-sharing and data-driven research. The RDA-US community has a slack channel for data service-related discussions.

  4. The DataCure slack channel. DataCure is an informal group of librarians and other information professionals whose members have significant roles or responsibilities in providing services in managing or curating research data. This document contains more information about this group. I am happy to help others joining the group.

  5. The Public Interest Corpus is a new project focused on developing large-scale, high-quality AI training data from the world’s libraries and archives to serve the public interest. With the rapid growing interest in AI, this project may become a major resource for publicly available AI training data.

  6. The Digital Library Federation (DLF) has a few working groups that are useful for the data service community. For example, the Metadata Support Group has a slack channel on metadata-related discussions.

  7. The Data Curation Network (DCN) offers annual workshops for data professionals to improve their skills. Travel expenses for workshops may be covered by DCN.

  8. The Data Services Continuing Professional Education (DSCPE) is a program for early-to-mid-career librarians to gain essential skills in data services. The best candidates are within three years of data service-related positions.

I attended two interesting workshops before the main event. The workshop materials are in the following links: Evolving the 3-2-1 backup rule for more resilient data and Programming Logic for Non-Programmers.

Finally, I would like to thank RDAP and the Summit sponsors for the generous scholarship.


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