3 People important to you

As a new data librarian, you will want to seek out fellow practitioners, mentors, and stakeholders in your organization and beyond.

3.1 Directory at your organization

If directory keyword searching is an option, consider searching bios for:

• ‘research management’
• ‘data visualization’
• ’data services’
• ‘data mining’
• ‘metadata librarian’
• ‘archivist’
• ‘assessment librarian’

These initial contacts may provide further leads as you build your network. In this data era, increasingly you will find data allies in unconventional places.

3.2 Other directories & communities

If you want to look beyond your organization for peers, you might try to use a federated directory search and other networking tools. Here are a few federated directories and communities to explore.

Table 3.1: Places to find external community.

name	about
IASSIST	From the site: “IASSIST is an international organization of professionals working in and with information technology and data services to support research and teaching in the social sciences. Its members are from a variety of workplaces, including data archives, statistical agencies, research centers, libraries, academic departments, government departments, and non-profit organizations.”
Code4Lib	From ‘About’: “code4lib isn’t entirely about code or libraries. It is a volunteer-driven collective of hackers, designers, architects, curators, catalogers, artists and instigators from around the world, who largely work for and with libraries, archives and museums on technology “stuff.” It started in the fall of 2003 as a mailing list when a group of library programmers decided to create an overarching community agnostic towards any particular language or technology.”
R4DS/TidyTuesday	A loose, yet supportive nework of people interested in use of R language for data science.
Direct2Experts	Consider searching for data librarians and other experts at nearby institions. Direct2Experts is a federated staff directory search across many academic and other institutions. You can search for keywords or specific job titles. Results are grouped by institution.
ORCID	From the advanced search page, you can search for individuals by the keywords mapped to their Orcid profile. (Example keyword search: “Research Data Management”)
ALA	ALA has multiple, projects, programs and traingings where you may meet and build community with fellow data librarians.

3.3 Conferences

Conferences are a great place to build your network. Try to be as social as you can. Go to postering sessions. Ask questions. Strike up conversations. Here are some conferences you might want to consider attending.

Table 3.2: Useful conferences for data librarians.

Name	about
csv,conf	“Featuring stories about data sharing and data analysis from science, journalism, government, and open source.”
RDAP Summit	The RDAP summit is “ relevant to the interests and needs of data managers and curators, librarians who work with research data, and researchers and data scientists.”
Code4Lib	Library conference focused on technology, often with data sessions covering topics such as natural language processing, research data management, and more.
Midwest Data Librarian Symposium	Academic data librarian unconference covering topics such as RDM, curating code, and more.
IASSIST Conference	IASSIST describes itself as “an international organization of professionals working with information technology and data services to support research and teaching in the social sciences.”
Research Data Alliance	Research Data Alliance “provides a neutral space where its members can come together to develop and adopt infrastructure that promotes data-sharing and data-driven research”
Library Assessment Conference	A library conference of "practitioners and researchers who have responsibility or interest in the broad field of library assessment".