This post is part of our Curators’ Corner series. Every so often we’ll feature a different DCN Curator. The series grew out of a community-building activity wherein curators at our partner organizations interview each other “chain-letter style” in order to get to know each other and their work outside of the DCN better. We hope you enjoy these posts!
Matthew Murray🦇 is the Data Librarian at the University of Colorado-Boulder. Matthew was interviewed by Talya Cooper in December 2024.
What is your name and your position title?
My name is Matthew Murray, and my position is Data Librarian, which I think is like the shortest librarian title they have in the library where I work. Everyone’s titles are like “Something and Something Else Librarian,” and I’m just “Data Librarian.” I’m in the Center for Research Data & Digital Scholarship (CRDDS) at the University of Colorado Boulder University Libraries. CRDDS is half University Libraries and half Research Computing. So it’s kind of a unique department (though other places have similar setups), and I am on the library side of that.
What’s with the bat emoji (🦇)?
There are three reasons for it. First, my name is somewhat common and this makes me immediately recognizable. My work email address has a “-2” at the end of it and there are at least three other people with my name in our campus email system. (Though, I don’t use the 🦇 at work.) I’ve missed emails when people have accidentally emailed one of the other Matthew Murrays and gotten emails meant for other people. Recently, I received emails from someone trying to reach the Executive Editor of the Washington Post!
Second, I’m interested in how various systems work with “non-standard” characters. I’ve seen datasets with incorrect titles and metadata because they haven’t correctly encoded characters like á or even ’ (an apostrophe)! It’s important to me that non-English datasets are accessible and findable, and I view the 🦇 as a way to stress-test systems to ensure that they can deal with other character sets. Can your systems deal with an academic article that has a 🦜 in the title?
Finally, I think it’s funny whenever I get something published with the emoji. At least one journal I’ve published in has refused!
How did you come to your current position?
I wanted to be a librarian because I like technology and I like helping people, but when I was in grad school for my Master’s in Library and Information Studies at the University of British Columbia, I really thought I would end up working in public libraries. While I was always interested in aspects of academic libraries, I focused more on the public library side of things. Although looking back at it, the fact that one of my final projects was starting an open access student journal leads me to think that academic libraries are where I should have been looking the whole time. I started in a position at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. That was a fellowship position in scholarly communications and also doing some research data-related stuff, just finding out what it is and what was needed on campus.
After UNLV I had a couple of jobs. One was scholarly communication-focused and the other was partially a data librarian position. And then this one came up that was fully data-related and it was the right place and right time for me because my partner had just gotten a job in Colorado. I applied for it, they interviewed me, and then they said they weren’t interested. But a month later, they contacted me for another interview and offered me the position! It was less the job than the place in many ways. But I’m happy with my job. I think it’s a good fit for me.
What do you do?
I go to meetings and I send emails and I teach workshops. I’m being somewhat facetious, but that is accurately what I do and is what many academic librarians do. Though the emails I write might be about different things than other librarians; more about research data management than how to find and cite articles for example.
I do data curation for data sets that are deposited into CU Scholar, which is our institutional repository. I help with data management plans. I run various workshops and sessions. We do a twice-a-year Research Data Foundations Camp, which is a four-day intensive camp that leads into a micro-credential. We do various workshops every semester for things like Wikidata, Open Refine, zines and data, Git and Github–which I co-teach with people from Research Computing–data ethics. All sorts of data-related things.
I help organize events for International Love Data Week and Transgender Awareness Week for the library and I work with other departments on campus to offer workshops. One big difference between my position and other librarians is about teaching and workshops. Often, when we talk about teaching from the librarian perspective, we’re talking about students, usually undergraduate students but sometimes graduate students. But CRDDS has faculty, staff, and members of the public, as well as undergraduate and graduate students, coming to our workshops. We’ve even partnered with Colorado State University to co-offer workshops because we realized how many of their students were attending our sessions. I think it’s really interesting to see the breadth of different people that are interested in the services that we offer. I’m also involved with some research projects. There’s one on machine actionable data management and sharing plans, one about PIDs for facilities and instruments, and some other grants I’ve been part of as a data management consultant.
How much of your job involves data curation?
We generally only curate data sets that are being deposited CU Scholar (and sometimes ones from the DCN!). There are two data librarians here, so we alternate who gets which ones depending on the types of data and how busy we are. The frustrating thing is that, because we are very much optional, as no one is required to put their dataset into CU Scholar, sometimes we’ll curate a data set and send it back and say, “Hey, these are the changes you need to make,” and they’ll just be like, “Okay, no, we’re going to put this somewhere else.” We do more data curation than is obvious from the data sets that are available in CU Scholar, because there are the ones you curate that don’t get published, for whatever reason, or they get published somewhere else.
A larger part of my job, which I think still falls within the realm of data curation, is teaching about data curation and data management; talking to faculty or students one-on-one about what they need to do for their projects, running workshops, and making learning resources all falls within that. That’s not technically me doing data curation directly, but it is data curation as part of my job. Being like, “Oh, this is why you should use good file names,” or “This is why you should use file formats that people can access,” or “This is why you should have good documentation”–all of that can be seen as part of data curation as well.
Why is data curation important to you?
I think it is important because there’s so much information that is lost, whether that’s research information, research data, or general information and content that’s just gone forever. An example of this, that’s not research-related, is from the remaster of the Mass Effect video games series that I was playing recently. When they released it, they were like “Oh, actually, we didn’t remaster this part because the backup we have was corrupt and it’s gone forever.” If that’s happening to multimillion-dollar companies, it’s happening to individual researchers and research groups constantly. I think we don’t realize how much of the data that we think is available and backed up is not actually going to be accessible in the future. And that’s the stuff that people are actively trying to archive versus the stuff that people are like, “Oh, yeah, it’s on a CD somewhere” or “It’s on a Google Drive.” That stuff is just going to be lost forever. But the other part that I think is important about data curation is also telling people “You can just delete that.” I think that’s a really valuable part of data curation. It’s not about keeping everything. A while ago, I was curating a dataset and I sent the researchers an email asking about all these weird files that were part of their submission and they told me “Oh, none of those are needed,” so we deleted them all before publishing the dataset. It’s choosing what things are important to keep, and making sure that they are as accessible as possible, in multiple senses of the word accessible. I think good data curation makes the research world better, and it encourages more research.
I love that part of our job is telling people to delete things!
Well, I think the blog post about CHAFF (Concealed, Hidden, and Forgotten Files) I co-wrote for the DCN recently is about that. It’s about those files that you don’t need to keep and can delete. That came about because I got a data set from DCN that had, literally, half a million junk files that needed to be deleted. Half a million of them! I couldn’t believe it. Because computer systems are often so locked down and people don’t always know how to use them, it means that we have to teach people what some of these files even are. People are often afraid, like “I don’t want to delete something if I don’t know what it is.” We have to tell people that’s something that you can delete so that people in the future aren’t wondering what it is.
Why is the Data Curation Network important?
The community is really a key aspect of this. Having people that I can talk to about things and get second opinions from. A place where we can go to be like, “I got a data set that I don’t know what to do with. Can someone help?” is really valuable. And I think having people to collaborate with on projects like writing stuff or conference presentations is great too. Everyone has skills in different areas and there are so many types of data out there that you can’t know everything. In the DCN, there are people who know about the most obscure file formats.
For me, personally, it’s also helped me get a better understanding of the American research data landscape, because I only moved to the U.S.A. in 2023 for this position. There’s a lot of America-related things, like government mandates, that I wasn’t super familiar with. When I started last year, I was like “The what memo? What is this thing?” There’s not a Wikipedia article about it! (Though maybe someone should write one…) My last two jobs were in Canada, and it is a different environment there. So being able to learn about these things from people who’ve been working with them for years helps give me a better understanding.
If you weren’t doing data curation, what would you be doing?
The other academic librarian field I’ve worked in was scholarly communications, so I feel I probably would do something in that area, or just some other type of librarian. It’s a challenging question, because to some extent, I do this job because I like it, but I also do it because I need to pay rent. And so I would be doing something. I think academia is definitely something that I find valuable, so I would probably be here somewhere, doing something in the library world. I did get asked to apply for a comics librarian position a little while ago, which would be a dream job because there are very few comics librarian positions. But it was less than six months after I got this one, and I’m like, “I can’t apply for another job when I’ve just moved to another country. This is the worst possible timing for this job to be available!” So ideally, comics librarianship, zine librarianship, and video game librarianship. The video game stuff has a lot of overlap with data too! I think there’s a lot of really interesting stuff to do with gaming scholarship and what data preservation looks like in that area. Like, where is the line between video games, software, apps, and data when we talk about data preservation? I have ideas about what that could look like, but I need someone to come and say “Hey, Matthew, help me with this video game citation project,” or whatever it happens to be. When you’re citing books or journals or movies you say it’s on page 12 or minute 45 or whatever, but for video games that can take dozens of hours to play and who knows how many choices to get a specific thing to happen? The citation can sometimes seem like, “Trust me, this happens at some point in the game, I promise.”
What’s your favorite cuisine?
I don’t know. I’m a vegetarian and I’ve been a vegetarian for a very long time, so generally it’s just like the vegetarian version of whatever is what I like to eat. And so I like vegetarian versions of Mexican food, Indian food, South Asian food. I lived in East and Southeast Asia for several years, so there’s a lot of stuff from over there that I enjoy. Every time I find vegetarian kimchi I’m always excited. Ethiopian food is one I like a bunch as well.
What do you like to do outside of work?
I co-host a podcast called Book Club for Masochists: A Readers’ Advisory podcast, with three other librarians. We started it in grad school when we thought we’d work in public libraries and wanted to improve our skills in readers’ advisory and book recommendation. Every month we choose a genre to read at random and have to read books from that genre and then on the podcast we discuss what we thought about those books. It’s called “Book Club For Masochists,” because we end up reading genres that we don’t like (though we do also get to read genres that we like!). I don’t think I’d ever really understood suffering on a reading level until I’d read Amish Romance and Monster Romance novels. Our episode on Amish Romance is the one I always tell people to listen to first and the one on Monster Romance just came out. From my point of view, Amish Romance is a bad genre, but a lot of people really like it. It’s a genre that, if you work in a public library working with adults, you’ve probably heard of it but if you don’t, you probably didn’t know that it existed. But it’s a big genre! We have over 200 episodes, which is horrifying to consider. But, overall, the podcast is a lot of fun to do. We also make a booklist for each genre featuring titles by BIPOC authors. We have over 100 of them!
I also read a lot of comics and graphic novels. Someone recently told me that they thought “a lot” of graphic novels would be, like, 30 a year. I read probably, at minimum, 300 graphic novels and manga a year (~330 in 2024). I read so many, an amount that would probably shock most people that read a few a year, but it is where I do most of my reading.
I play video games. I make zines. Making Zines is fun. I made a bunch of issues of Two-Fisted Library Stories, which is an anthology of prose and comics about libraries. And then I did Catalogues & Cardigans: A Library RPG Zine, which is a pen and paper tabletop roleplaying game zine all about libraries that had contributions from a lot of other people that worked in libraries. Those are all freely available to download online. So you can check them out. Add them to your library’s collections! I send a lot of postcards and zines in the mail. There’s a stack of envelopes on my desk. [Shows stack of multi-coloured envelopes.]
What’s your favorite city?
I think this is a really challenging question for me to answer because I’ve lived in a lot of places and travelled a lot. I’ve lived in three different continents and a bunch of countries. So there are a lot of cities that I’d like to visit and there are some I would like to return to. But there’s visiting somewhere and then there’s living somewhere, and those are two very different things. I just don’t think I really have an answer for this. There are lots of cool cities and I like ones that have art galleries and comic book shops, are walkable, and have good public transit.
Where would you most like to travel to next (state/country/continent/city)?
My partner and I want to go back to East Asia. We’ve both traveled there separately, but we like to go together and visit Japan, Taiwan, and maybe some other places as well. So that would be fun. But we’ll see what happens with that. We both live very far away from our families so often when we travel it’s to go and see family. Where am I going to visit next? Probably Denver, because it’s just a few hours away by car.
To learn more about Matthew🦇, and the datasets he has curated for the DCN, see his curator page!