GC Library Welcomes Steve Zweibel, Data & Digital Projects Librarian

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Steve Zweibel, GC’s new Data & Digital Projects Librarian

The Graduate Center Library is delighted to introduce Steve Zweibel, our new Data & Digital Projects Librarian (itself a new position here). Steve comes to us from a visiting lectureship at Hunter College, where he built several useful library tools, including Augur, a web application to track reference question data; a mobile app for the CUNY library catalog; and the wonderfully-named Know Thy Shelf, a radio frequency identification (RFID)-based system for doing library inventories.

At Hunter, Steve also performed a great deal of reference and instruction work, so he’ll hit the ground running as a reference and liaison librarian here. Steve will be the library’s liaison to Earth & Environmental Sciences, Psychology, and Educational Psychology — fields that involve a lot of data-intensive research. He will also liaise with Comparative Literature, a responsibility for which he was well prepared by his undergraduate degree from St. John’s College, famous for its distinctive “great books” curriculum.

Steve earned his master’s degree in library and information science from Long Island University in 2010, and he is currently in his last semester of the Digital Humanities track of the GC’s MALS program. As a MALS student, he built DH Box, a very cool cloud-based computer lab for digital humanities research (including the tools Omeka, NLTK, IPython, R Studio, and Mallet). DH Box is already attracting attention beyond the GC, including a National Endowment for the Humanities Start-Up grant. His work on DH Box also gave him experience with data issues, including the challenges of storing, cleaning, and massaging data.

Fittingly, then, Steve will also support digital project creation by GC researchers across the disciplines, help preserve those projects, and support faculty and students with their data-based research and data management needs. He will also coordinate the library’s growing series of workshops on research skills and tools.

Students and faculty are welcome to contact Steve at szweibel@gc.cuny.edu.

About the Author

Jill Cirasella is the Scholarly Communication Librarian and University Liaison at the CUNY Graduate Center.