Portrait of Ryan Womack by B. Ganchimeg

Ryan Womack is Data Librarian at Rutgers University.

pronouns: he/him

Contact

see the Contact tab for complete details

Curriculum Vitae

CV in html or pdf format.

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 Services, including outreach and training for data, assisting students and faculty, acquisition of data sources, development of research guides, and providing support for quantitative research across a range of disciplines. I led the development of the Graduate Specialist Program, hiring Rutgers-NB graduate students to teach workshops and provide consultations in advanced research methods, including Python, R, and other data science topics. I am serving from 2022 to 2025 as the Head of the New Brunswick Libraries Research Services Unit. 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. I am also the New Brunswick Libraries Point of Contact for Government Documents and Statistical Data Services.

Some occasional thoughts about data and other things are at my blog here. I also maintain the Libraries research guide for Data and for Economics.

A current focus for me is the development of useful guides to data and statistical resources related to Mongolia and the countries of Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan). The Central Asia and Mongolia Gender Data Portal (CAMGDP) exemplifies this.

Scholarship

This page highlights major publications. See the CV links above for complete and current publication details.

Selected Peer-reviewed Articles

Selected Additional Publications

Selected Presentations

Selected Workshops

Service

I am an active member of IASSIST (the International Association for Social Science Information Service and Technology). I served as Member at Large for the USA from 2019 to 2023, and 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.

Career Timeline

A concise timeline of my career is available.

Last updated 2023-09-08

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latest blog posts

Spinning up new static site servers, or, diversification as risk management

As I mentioned in my last blog post, I am trying to broaden my knowledge and secure my web assets by learning a bit more about other services and migrating sites there, after realizing that it is perhaps not wise to remain reliant on AWS. This is a quick commentary on services that I learned about and tried (this post is one source of information). My needs are simple. All my sites are static, with mail hosting and any other services taken care of elsewhere. Read more...

Diversification as Risk Management, or, Disaster with AWS

That title sounds a bit Rocky and Bullwinkle to me. But it is appropriate to the situation. I have migrated an older Wordpress post to this blog on AWS backup that provides some context or evidence of my past history with AWS. Let me try to tell this story as concisely as I can. For the TL;DR crowd, the takeaways are labeled this whole episode made me realize. I had been using AWS to serve all of my various websites for a long time. Read more...

Missing Time Series

I just posted a rather uncharacteristic video on YouTube about my deletion of videos. Usually I confine myself to either instructional videos or presentations, but this was just a rambling self-explanatory monologue. This is a text version of some similar thoughts. In my work, my personal organizing practice is to scan for files that are ten years old (or more) and reviewing them to either delete or permanently archive as a memento of the past. Read more...