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!
Jennifer Patiño is the Data and Digital Scholarship Librarian at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. Jennifer was interviewed by Matthew Murray in March 2025.
What’s your current position and how did you come to it?
I am the Data and Digital Scholarship Librarian over at UW Madison. I’m from Chicago, and I have a background in community archives. I was doing that work for a couple of years, and I decided to go back to school for library science. My school had a data curation program that felt very similar to what I’d been already doing with community archives, which was, you know, helping people manage their physical and digital materials. And after I graduated from my program at Urbana-Champaign, I saw this diversity residency at UW-Madison that focused on data curation and I got excited about that. I got the residency and it was for three years. At the end of the residency I was offered a permanent position and I’ve been here for five years now at UW-Madison.
What do you do?
In my position, I help with Research Data Services, you know, helping researchers with data management plans. I support our institutional repository, MINDS@UW, and then I also support some of our text analysis tools in the libraries. I run workshops on those specifically focused around their use in the digital humanities. So that’s a little bit about what I do. You know, just on the digital scholarship side I help create programs and workshops on a variety of different topics and tools as the opportunities come up and as people have interest in them.
How much of your job involves data curation?
Because I support the institutional repository, I would say a fair amount. I help researchers upload their data sets and kind of walk them through the best practices for doing that. So that’s pretty day-to-day and, you know, over time as mandates have changed, that can be heavier at times as well. But then, also, there’s things that aren’t directly data curation, but that support data curation, like making educational and outreach materials. Also, I’ve been working on doing some metadata remediation for our repository as well to make things more accessible.
Why is data curation important to you?
Going back to the community archives work that I was doing, it’s very related in terms of helping people take control of their materials and be able to, you know, have a say in how their materials get used down the line and so preserving them, making them accessible. And yeah, I think it helps. I really enjoy having that empowering aspect to it, like helping people communicate with others in the future, too. But also with the repository, I get to see some of the other side of it. When I’m working with people who are interested in data sets that are in our repository, but you know, the data is from way back when the repository was first starting, and there’s just not enough information to be useful. Getting to see both, the exciting part of helping people feel empowered, but then also the other side of it, of like, what happens when you don’t necessarily have all the information.
Yeah, the early days of data publishing didn’t have a lot of data curation a lot of the time. So often the files are there but there’s no documentation or they’re in an inaccessible format.
Yep, absolutely.
Why is the Data Curation Network important?
I have really enjoyed having a network of peers that I can turn to because for a lot of this stuff the requirements or expectations can change so quickly. And you know, even just with the technology and what is recommended as best practices, all that stuff can be hard to keep up with. I really appreciate having a network of people that I can talk to to navigate that together and not have to just sort of like try to figure that out from scratch at my own institution. Being able to connect with other people who are going through the same thing and figuring out solutions together.
Is there anything you’d like to see the DCN do in the future?
You’ve brought up zine stuff that you’ve done on the data side of things. I love zines. I’ve only made one for work, but I’ve been wanting to get into them more. And like I don’t know. It’s very cool to hear about what you’re doing. I think that zines are such a good way to share chunks or bits of information in a way that is perfect and beautiful and fun and engaging and cool. I would be all about a DCN zine.
If you weren’t doing data curation, what would you be doing?
So I really liked this question. I have a background in art history and I think probably if I wasn’t doing data curation, I’d be running like a DIY art space sometime, somewhere, and just like buying way too much of the art myself for it to be profitable for me at all. I think I’d be running an art gallery and curating art shows. So still curation, but of a different sort.
What’s your favorite cuisine?
I’m Mexican-American and I’m biased in that I feel like Mexican food is like some of the best food in the world. And so I really love Mexican food. I love reading about it. I love cooking it. I love eating it. I love learning about it. There’s just a lot of history about Mexican food in the US that I really like learning about. And then the different regions of Mexican food in Mexico.
I’m obsessed with Mexican food and my favorite show ever, or one of my favorite shows, was Taco Chronicles on Netflix. I’m obsessed with that show, it’s so good. It like makes me so hungry every time I watch it. But yeah, Mexican food for the win.
What do you like to do outside of work?
I collect art prints, and I’ve been collecting tarot decks since I was 14. So I have like this massive collection, and I feel like that was like my first exposure to art history, all these little symbols that you interpret. I also take road trips with my husband. We take long road trips and short road trips. I read and I write poetry, and then I love plants. I love growing plants and cooking with them, and learning about some of the more traditional Mexican culinary and medicinal uses of them and all the different kinds of historical uses.
What’s your favourite aspect of road trips?
Oh, I love coming up with a good playlist for a road trip! So I don’t actually drive, I navigate, so I love road trips because I don’t have to drive. My favorite thing to do on road trips is to just come up with a really solid playlist that can get us through. Like, I’ll alternate between podcasts and music, if we really need to stay awake. I’m so excited to put that playlist together.
Do you like roadside attractions?
Oh, I love them! I love just all of them. Give me every tourist trap that there is. I’m so excited for it. I actually just bought a book on weird attractions in Wisconsin that we’re going to try to go to. I haven’t been there yet, but there’s a plaque somewhere in Madison that’s for where Elvis once broke up a fight at a gas station.
What’s your favorite city?
Chicago. I was born and raised there. I grew up on the South Side and, really, what I love about Chicago is it’s very community based. I feel like I have a lot of values from growing up there that I carry with me. It also has amazing architecture. Just a beautiful city. I feel like it’s kind of a tough town, depending on where you grow up; there’s a lot to navigate and there’s a lot of resilience. I feel like, you know, people are very sweet, there’s a lot of love. And if you grow up there, you also learn to survive, you learn how to fight, and how to fight for each other. It stays with you, and then you carry it with you. And yeah, it’s my hometown.
Where would you most like to travel to next?
My next destination is Mexico City, because I’ve never actually been. I’m hoping to go there within the next year and just check out the museums. I really want to go to–I think it’s the National Museum of Anthropology. There is a massive sculpture of the Aztec earth goddess Coatlicue that I really want to see. Then there’s the Frida Kahlo House, of course. And then I want to just try all of the different street food that I can while I’m there. I’m super excited.
Is there anything else you would like to talk about?
Being somebody that really values community, I think that that’s something that I really appreciate about the Data Curation Network. Just getting to connect with others and learn from them. It’s a really great group. I’m so excited to continue to work with all of you and to learn from all of you.
To learn more about Jennifer, and the datasets she has curated for the DCN, see her curator page!