ARL has appointed Rick Johnson as a visiting program officer (VPO) to foster SHARE metadata enhancements and strengthen partnerships between SHARE and other research data stewards and providers; he will serve from September 2015 to March 2017. Johnson is program co-director for the Digital Initiatives and Scholarship Program and head of Data Curation and Digital Library Solutions at University of Notre Dame’s Hesburgh Libraries.
SHARE is a joint effort of ARL, the Association of American Universities (AAU), the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU), and the Center for Open Science (COS) to maximize research impact by making a comprehensive inventory of research widely accessible, discoverable, and reusable. To fulfill its mission SHARE is building a free, open data set about research and scholarly activities across their life cycle.
In his role as a VPO for SHARE, Johnson will develop and deepen SHARE partnerships with other organizations in order to foster a tighter network of research repositories, databases, and information systems. Specifically, these efforts will focus on improving data sharing, metadata quality and alignment, and linking across partner systems, data providers, and SHARE data consumers.
As co-director for the Digital Initiatives and Scholarship Program and head of Data Curation and Digital Library Solutions at University of Notre Dame, Johnson has gained valuable, integrated experience working on research and digital repository initiatives both at the institutional and community level. In addition to his participation in the SHARE Working Group, he has contributed to several other research data collaborations, such as Data and Software Preservation for Open Science (DASPOS), a grant-funded project focused on open sharing of scientific data within high-energy physics. Johnson also spearheaded the implementation of the University of Notre Dame’s institutional repository, CurateND, with an emphasis on any format as data, and archiving all related research output and works together, regardless of format. Additionally, he has been involved with many community-based digital repository initiatives within the multi-institutional Hydra project as both a code contributor and technical manager.
“Rick Johnson is a skilled manager of digital data initiatives with a focus on interoperability and openness,” said SHARE director Tyler Walters. “One of the major challenges SHARE faces is poor and inconsistent application of metadata to research outputs, which hinders the sharing of research data across systems and makes tracking research activities difficult. Rick’s abilities will serve SHARE well in enhancing the metadata we collect and facilitating integration with research information systems around the world.”
Diane Parr Walker, the Edward H. Arnold university librarian at the University of Notre Dame, said, “The Hesburgh Libraries at Notre Dame are committed to preserving and globally sharing the research results and new knowledge created by our faculty and students, and we are continuously evolving access to and discovery of resources that contribute to their work. This partnership with ARL and SHARE to create openly accessible, global networks of data and research will advance our library mission and help maximize every research university’s ability to make a greater impact around the world.”
“Research communities have made great strides in increasing access to materials, activities, and systems that have historically been disconnected from one another,” said Johnson. “Through its unique infrastructure, SHARE is well positioned to cultivate partnerships that foster even more alignment, linking, and mobility across research systems, further accelerating progress and discovery.”
The ARL VPO program provides opportunities for outstanding staff members at ARL member libraries 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 ARL’s Visiting Program Officer program.
About ARL
The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) is a nonprofit organization of 124 research libraries in the US and Canada. ARL’s mission is to influence the changing environment of scholarly communication and the public policies that affect research libraries and the diverse communities they serve. ARL pursues this mission by advancing the goals of its member research libraries, providing leadership in public and information policy to the scholarly and higher education communities, fostering the exchange of ideas and expertise, facilitating the emergence of new roles for research libraries, and shaping a future environment that leverages its interests with those of allied organizations. ARL is on the web at http://www.arl.org/.
About SHARE
SHARE is a higher education initiative whose mission is to maximize research impact by making a comprehensive inventory of research widely accessible, discoverable, and reusable. To fulfill this mission SHARE is building a free, open data set about research and scholarly activities across their life cycle. The Association of Research Libraries (ARL), the Association of American Universities (AAU), and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) jointly launched the SHARE initiative in 2013. The Center for Open Science (COS) has been SHARE’s technical partner since June 2014. SHARE’s founders strongly believe that ensuring broad and continuing access to research is central to the mission of higher education. SHARE is funded, in part, by grants from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). SHARE is on the web at https://www.share-research.org/.