The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has appointed Cynthia Hudson-Vitale of Penn State University and Jennifer Muilenburg of University of Washington as part-time visiting program officers for research data, effective March 15 and April 1, 2019, respectively. Hudson-Vitale and Muilenburg will work on ARL’s Scholars and Scholarship team, developing policies and practices to advance research data sharing.
As visiting program officers, Hudson-Vitale and Muilenburg will help create a road map for institutions to implement FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable) data principles. Thanks to their deep expertise in data curation and their connections with the data stewardship community, these colleagues will strengthen ARL’s partnerships with the Association of American Universities (AAU) and Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) to advance public access to data and enhance ARL libraries’ capacity to support data-intensive science.
Kacy Redd, associate vice president of research & STEM education at the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities said, “We are pleased to collaborate with ARL in building on the work of our Public Access Working Group. Together we will convene key units within our member institutions—including research computing, sponsored research, and libraries—to advance FAIR data and data sharing for excellence in research.”
ARL’s membership includes university, public, and national libraries—all of whom manage research data. “Institutions like the National Library of Medicine are heavily invested in research data stewardship, and we look forward to working with ARL to better connect university research data management to federal research agencies,” said Patricia Flatley Brennan, director of the National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health.
Cynthia Hudson-Vitale is head of Research Informatics and Publishing at Penn State University Libraries, where she leads all aspects of the libraries’ digital scholarship endeavors and serves on the libraries’ senior administrative team. Hudson-Vitale was also a founding member of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation–funded Data Curation Network. Jennifer Muilenburg is the Research Data Services librarian at University of Washington. Working with the campus-wide eScience Institute to advance data-intensive discovery in all fields, she is focused on the increase in data science across the university and its implications for library service and campus collaborations. Active within organizations such as the International Association for Social Science Information Services and Technology (IASSIST) and the Research Data Alliance (RDA), both Hudson-Vitale and Muilenburg will serve as liaisons with key ARL constituencies.
The ARL Visiting Program Officer program provides opportunities for outstanding staff at ARL member libraries and archives to contribute to special projects and programs, either in whole or in part, in order to advance the agenda of the Association. Visit the ARL website for more information about the Visiting Program Officer program.
About the Association of Research Libraries
The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) is a nonprofit organization of 124 research libraries in Canada and the US whose mission is to advance research, learning, and scholarly communication. The Association fosters the open exchange of ideas and expertise, promotes equity and diversity, and pursues advocacy and public policy efforts that reflect the values of the library, scholarly, and higher education communities. ARL forges partnerships and catalyzes the collective efforts of research libraries to enable knowledge creation and to achieve enduring and barrier-free access to information. ARL is on the web at ARL.org.
