Ryan Womack

Librarianship

Since 2013, I serve as Data Librarian for the New Brunswick Libraries, part of Rutgers University Libraries. Prior to this, I was Data and Economics Librarian, and prior to that, Business and Economics Librarian. Since 1999, I have been a member of the library faculty of Rutgers University-New Brunswick. I was granted tenure and promoted to the rank of Librarian II in 2005. In 2019, I was promoted to the rank of Librarian I (equivalent to Full Professor). I hold an M.A. in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania, an M.S. in Library Science from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and an M.S. in Statistics and Biostatistics from Rutgers University-New Brunswick.

As Data Librarian for Rutgers-New Brunswick, I am responsible for data collections and Data Services, including acquisition of data sources, development of research guides, outreach and training for data, assisting students and faculty, and providing support for quantitative research across a range of disciplines. I am particularly interested in developing and supporting data literacy and statistical literacy.

I am the subject specialist for and liaison to the Department of Economics, and the Department of Agricultural, Food, and Resource Economics. I manage the Libraries\’ collections, give instructional sessions, and help researchers and students locate information in these disciplines.

For the latest in data news, read and subscribe to my RyanData blog at RyanData.wordpress.com. I also maintain the Libraries research guide for Data and for Economics.

Selected Peer-reviewed Articles

• Ryan Womack, “ARL Libraries and Research: Correlates of Grant Funding”, The Journal of Academic Librarianship, volume 42, issue 4, 2016.
• Ryan Womack, “Research Data in Core Journals in Biology, Chemistry, Mathematics, and Physics”, PLoS ONE, volume 10, issue 12, 2015.
• Ryan Womack, “Data Visualization and Information Literacy”, IASSIST Quarterly, volume 38, issue 1, 2014, pp. 12-17.
• Ryan Womack, “The Orientation and Training of New Librarians for Business Information”, Journal of Business and Finance Librarianship, volume 13, issue 3, 2008, pp. 217-226. Preprint in RUcore
• Ryan Womack, “Information Intermediaries and Optimal Information Distribution”, Library and Information Science Research, vol. 24, no. 2, 2002, pp. 129-155. Preprint in RUcore

Selected Additional Publications

• Mei Ling Lo, Li Sun, Ryan Womack, Connie Wu, and Tao Yang. “Celebrating Diversity, Welcoming the World: Developing Chinese Webpages at Rutgers University Libraries”, 2009. CALA Occasional Papers Series, no. 5, June 2009.
• Ryan Womack (Editor), Success by the Numbers: Statistics for Business Development. Chicago: Reference and User Services Association of the American Library Association, 2005. (RUSA Occasional Paper, number 28).
• Ryan Womack, “High Speed, High Price, High Demand: Business Internet Resources and Databases in American Academic Libraries”, Proceedings of Central Asia 2002: Internet and Library, Information Resources in Science, Culture, Education, and Business, Bukhara, Uzbekistan, October 2002, pp. 37-41.

Selected Presentations

• “Big Data, Data Visualization, and Reproducible Research”, Mongolian University of Science and Technology, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, May 12, 2017.
• “Data in Libraries: Data Processing and Visualization”, Reference and User Services Association of the American Library Association, online, , May 4, 2017 [repeated November 2, 2017].
• “Enhancing Understanding Through Data Visualization”, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ, December 5, 2016.
• “Putting Reproducibility into Practice: Workflows and Case Studies”, Rutgers Workshop on Reproducibility in Experimental and Computational Science, Piscataway, NJ, October 10, 2016. ”(a bit about) Data Visualization”], ICPSR Biennial Meeting, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, October 2, 2015.

Selected Workshops

• “A Short Course in Multivariate Statistical Methods with R/Олон хэмжээст статистикийн богино хэмжээний сургалт R программ дээр”, one-week mini-course, Mongolian University of Life Sciences [Хөдөө аж ахуйн их сургуул], Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, February 26-March 2, 2018.
• “Data Literacy for All, with R”, IASSIST Annual Conference, Lawrence, Kansas, May 23, 2017 [repeated May 29, 2018 IASSIST Annual Conference, Montréal, Canada].
• “Topics in Data Science/Өгөгдлийн шинжлэх ухаан [Data Visualization, Big Data, Reproducible Research, and Data Literacy]”, National Statistics Office of Mongolia, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, May 8-9, 2017. PDF available at https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/T3CF9SS7.
• Ryan Womack, “Hands-On Big Data”, IASSIST Annual Conference, Minneapolis, Minnesota, June 2, 2015.
• “Data Visualization and R”, IASSIST Annual Conference, Cologne, Germany, May 29, 2013 [repeated June 3, 2014, IASSIST Annual Conference, Toronto, Canada].
• R workshops at Rutgers are offered to students and faculty across the University, from a wide range of science and social science departments. Topics include statistical functions, graphics, data manipulation, data visualization, time series, and survival analysis. See my R page for workshop materials.

Service

I am an active member of IASSIST (the International Association for Social Science Information Service and Technology), and served as Secretary of the Association from 2015 to 2019. On the national level, I was once active in the Business Reference and Services Section (BRASS) of the American Library Association, including a term as Chair. See my CV for further details of local activity.