My name is Alahna, and I am a master's student in library and information science at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. During the summit, I learned about good data practice and how that is being put into effect with different projects that people are working on like the Emmett Till project in New Orleans. Another project that I learned about is The Data Nudge which is a monthly newsletter created by Sandi Caldrone. The newsletter strives to help people and organizations have better research data management and I will be following this newsletter in the future to stay informed.

My experience with the theme “Building on Experience: Centering Communities in Data Creation and Access” comes from an internship I did in digital preservation where we were preserving the records of churches in the Rogers Park, Chicago, Illinois community. This project was started by a professor at Loyola University Chicago to preserve the history of churches that were being closed down and consolidated under one church. The history of these churches were going to be lost, so he decided to preserve their records and create an online exhibit so people would be  able to access and learn about the churches’ history. During the internship we had to do a lot of re-curation for some of the records,which Bryan Gee talked about in relation to the Texas Data repository.

A talk that interested me the most was the session called Our Repository Doesn’t Publish Sensitive Data But How Do We Put This Into Practice. It was led by Amy Ferguson, Alicia Hoeflich Mohr, Leslie Kirsch, and Rachel Woodbrook. I have not had the chance to work with overly sensitive material yet, so getting the chance to learn more about the discussions  happening around it was really informative. During the talk a topic of discussion was data use agreements and how the individual and organizations format them.

Overall, the thing that I enjoyed most about the summit were the panels. Even though I did not ask a lot of questions during them I really liked seeing all the questions other people had. As someone who is very new to the profession it was really good to see what questions professions had for the field. Every day of the summit I learned so many new things and got to see what the main points of discussion are for people who have been working in this profession for a long time. I am thankful for the opportunity granted to me to be able to participate in this year's RDAP Summit.