Beyond the Job Title: Data Strategist

A library tech job interview with Steve Meyer

Posted on July 24, 2024 in Job Profiles

Authors:

Steve Meyer
A tech librarian interested in the job of data strategist

Core to LibTech Insights‘s mission is demystifying the broad and dynamic field of tech librarianship in higher ed. In this series, we interview a librarian every month to learn a little more about their position. As library tech jobs proliferate, they sometimes come with unfamiliar, jargony, or intimidating titles. We want to go beyond the title and look at the responsibilities, skills, and joys that make up the job. We hope this series will increase your knowledge of library tech jobs and skills out there and offer you greater insight into the working lives of your colleagues.

For our third installment, we spoke to Steve Meyer at the University of Wisconsin–Madison to learn more about his job as a Data Strategist. Check out our archive of job profiles. 💫

What is your job title and responsibilities?

Within the UW–Madison Libraries, my working title is Data Strategist. As Data Strategist, my responsibilities fall into two tracks, one for data policy and another for operational work. On the policy side, I contribute to activities like our campus data governance program. In that capacity, I serve as the Libraries’ representative for campus Data Stewards, which involves defining the official Library Data Domain and establishing the data classification for library data.

On the operational side of things, I use my technical background to do a wide array of data processing work for the Libraries. Some of that work is inward-facing and includes tasks like large-scale data processing of our collections data. This involves managing some of the Libraries’ internal reporting infrastructure and generating reports that look at our entire collection of over 10 million print and electronic titles. Examples of this kind of work include our national reporting to ARL and ACRL. Additionally, some of our collection assessment reports include data visualizations for high-level collection statistics or more focused views that describe use of print and electronic journals. I have also worked on data visualization projects for assessment of our library instruction program in coordination with the Libraries’ Teaching and Learning Programs Office.

I am also involved in some outward or patron-facing work to support teaching and research at UW–Madison. In particular, I serve as the primary contact for our campus subscription to a large vendor dataset. In this role, I have partnered with the UW–Madison Center for High Throughput Computing (CHTC) because this dataset is larger than one that can be stored and analyzed on a personal computer. The CHTC provides UW–Madison faculty, staff, and students with access to a research computing cluster when their computational needs exceed the capacity of their own hardware. In coordination with other colleagues at the Libraries, I have hosted a workshop to help campus researchers get up and running using this dataset in the CHTC’s computer cluster.

Can you describe your career trajectory leading up to this position?

I had the good fortune to join the NCSU Libraries Fellows program right after library school. There, my time was split between an entry-level librarian position doing typical reference and instruction work at their Textiles and Engineering Library and contributing to a project to develop an electronic resource management system in the library’s IT department.

When my fellowship ended, I joined the UW–Madison Libraries as a Library Application Developer where I worked on various web development projects, including the development of the first iteration of our locally developed catalog discovery system. I briefly joined OCLC as a Technical Product Manager working on their API and platform team before returning to UW–Madison to begin work in my current position as Data Strategist.

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Does your position require any specialized tech skills, coding languages, and/or software knowledge? How or when in your career did you develop them?

The Data Strategist role at UW–Madison exists on a technical spectrum. If another individual held this position, he/she/they might be less technical and skew somewhat more toward the policy side of the position. However, some technical expertise is required so that a Data Strategist is able to understand the full scope of work. Developing and implementing strategies for the use and management of data in a large academic library requires knowledge of diverse forms of data, from library bibliographic description to research data, and the various ways they are stored, formatted, and processed.

As noted above, I have a background in web application development and specifically what would be understood in the broader IT industry as full stack development. I understand how contemporary SQL databases are modeled, how modern indexing systems, like Apache Solr, work, and how application frameworks, like Ruby on Rails, access database tables or make API calls to a search index to extract information for presentation on web pages. Beyond this “backend” development work, I have basic competence with the core, “front-end” application development technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. I began developing these skills in library school through courses in database design and information architecture and have honed them throughout my career with real-world projects.

Over the past 20 years since I graduated from library school, I have utilized many different programming languages, such as PHP, Ruby, Java, Python, and JavaScript. Being multilingual with respect to computer programming languages has been very helpful insofar as it enables me to be responsive to a diverse set of data programming tasks and projects. At the UW–Madison Libraries, our go-to language is Ruby because we make extensive use of the Ruby on Rails web development framework. However, using a compiled language like Java is advantageous when processing larger datasets because it affords us some performance benefits. In other cases, it is helpful to have basic fluency with a language like Python since it allows me to be conversant in research computing spaces where it is used alongside R. Finally, developing some intermediate-to-advanced fluency with the front-end language JavaScript has provided me with the ability to utilize data visualization technologies that render in a browser. This helps me to make contributions to telling the UW–Madison Libraries story through data.

What is the most rewarding part of your job?

The most rewarding parts of my job are the continuous learning and the opportunity to work with great colleagues inside and outside the Libraries. As our campus adopts new modes of teaching and research, the Libraries adapt, for example, by acquiring datasets in addition to traditional library materials. In order to support the University’s mission, we are faced with exciting new challenges, such as dealing with data at scale and directing our computational expertise, which has traditionally been focused on internal operations, outward so that we can help students and researchers take full advantage of these new library materials.

In order to meet those challenges, I am forever grateful to the colleagues with whom I get to work. Within the Libraries, I have always been able to lean on the deep knowledge of my local catalogers, both in terms of technical metadata specifications as well as their knowledge of historical practices and what it is like to be custodians of a dataset comprised of tens of millions of records and managed over many decades. Within my own IT department at the Libraries and with campus partners like the staff at the UW–Madison CHTC, I am always learning about new computer programming technologies and techniques. It is also not possible to fulfill my role contributing to data policies for the library without the input of nearly all campus library staff. Without these collaborations, internal and external, it would be impossible to be successful as a Data Strategist.

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