On November 1, 2021, Scout Calvert began her position as Associate Professor and Research Data Librarian for the University Libraries at UNL and as research data lead for the University of Nebraska Consortium of Libraries (UNCL). She will coordinate and coalesce research data support in the Libraries and participate in the University’s broader efforts to store, preserve, share, and support researchers in all their data needs. Calvert will also lead research data efforts for UNCL, including pursuing opportunities for increased collaboration and building on existing strengths.
She looks forward to working with Nebraska faculty to increase the amount of data that is shared and protected in data repositories. Calvert says that the UNL repository infrastructure is good, but it needs more data sets to help make it more visible to other scholars.
“The technological infrastructure for preserving and sharing data has matured making the work more effective and a culture shift is underway,” explains Calvert, “faculty and grad students know that the library is the place to help with data management.”
Calvert came to Nebraska after serving 5 years as the Data Librarian at Michigan State University Libraries. She received her M.A. in Information Resources and Library Science from the University of Arizona in 1999 and her PH.D. in the History of Consciousness (study of the social practices of science and technology) from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She has held various positions in libraries since 1999. In 2012 she joined the Department of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine as Postdoctoral Researcher and in 2014 had a two-year appointment as the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation at the University of California, Los Angeles Library.
Work on family genealogy influenced Calvert’s own interest in data curation. She could see the way that the different tools of genealogy shaped, or enabled, certain kinds of data to be collected and certain narratives to be told. Her published research is on data and information infrastructure. She has published book chapters, journal articles, and given numerous presentations on a variety of topics including bovine genetics, emerging technologies, data curation, and family genealogy.
Calvert looks forward to an opportunity where she can work side-by-side with faculty and be embedded on research projects to help researchers take care of their data. She hopes to talk to people about their data practice to improve data management. Calvert is curious about many topics -- cows, data, Nebraska history. She can be contacted at: scout.calvert@unl.edu.