Alison Wells received an Anna Radkowski-Lee Graduate Assistantship for the 2022-2023 academic year as the Outreach and Marketing Graduate Assistant. Alison is a student in the MSIS program at UAlbany’s College of Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security, and Cybersecurity.  

After graduating from SUNY Plattsburgh with a degree in Communications (Media Production), she worked for Callanan Industries as a quality control technician while starting to pursue her interest in librarianship via CEHC’s online MSIS program. She now joins the University Libraries in a role designed to continue to help grow the Libraries’ Student Ambassadors program and boost our contributions to social media, focusing on Instagram operations.  

We are glad to have Alison on board this academic year and look forward to all the wonderful contributions she will surely make.  
 

Another Anna Radkowski-Lee Graduate Assistantship was awarded to Dewey Graduate Library to assist with evaluation of the activities of the Scholarly Communication Team. Established in May 2020, the Scholarly Communication Team works to implement a “culture of open” scholarship and research at the University.  In August 2022, we welcomed Prashant Patel to the Dewey Library to assist with assessing the team’s initiatives and actions. Prashant, who is pursuing an MS in Data Science from the University’s Mathematics Department, hails from Toronto, Ontario Canada and has a BS in Mathematics and Statistics from the University of Toronto, Scarborough. He came to UAlbany for his Masters’ because he could find no other program that offers a concentration in topological data analysis. Most data scientists, he says learn topological methods on the job so this training is valuable and unique.

The Scholarly Communication team was interested in hiring a data science student to assist with compiling data and statistics that demonstrate the value of Scholarly Communication Services. These services are quite broad and include topics such as fostering increasingly open access to scholarly research, support for adoption of open educational resources, providing scholarly impact metrics, supporting open data endeavors and  research data management, fielding copyright and authors’ rights questions, and related activities. These wide-ranging, interdisciplinary initiatives are helping the Libraries move into new roles on campus and demonstrate the value of the Libraries in new, forward-thinking ways. 

Thus, the Team sought support and expertise in taking data collected about its services and using it to effectively show the impact of Scholarly Communication as a new library service. Prashant wowed the Scholarly Communication Team with his energy, his leadership in the data science community, and his examples of projects and dashboards he had previously created.  When asked why he was interested in working for the Dewey Library as the Scholarly Communication Assessment Graduate Assistant, Prashant said it was not a typical graduate assistantship position, and he was excited about the prospect of using APIs and creating assessment dashboards for the Scholarly Communication Team. We are fortunate to have a dynamo like Prashant on board, and look forward to having replicable strategies for collecting, analyzing and visualizing data about our Scholarly Communication initiatives, and an attractive annual report by the time his assistantship concludes in May.