I’ve been working as a librarian for over a decade. But for some reason, this is the year I’ve been discovered by journalists. I have appeared in Nature three times this academic year. The three articles include:
Wild, S. (2025) Need to update your data? Follow these five tips. Nature 643, 868-869.
Briney regularly helps researchers to wrangle their data. Her favourite tips for data management are to establish a file naming convention, which includes the date (often given as YYYYMMDD or YYYY-MM-DD), and to store files in their correct folders.
Dance, A. (2026) Why every scientist needs a librarian. Nature 650, 1063-1065.
Librarians like to say that an hour in the library is worth a month in the laboratory, quips Kristin Briney, biology and biological engineering librarian at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, California. And the Caltech library team points out that a researcher could avoid hours of solo Internet searching by just sending a quick e-mail to a specialist librarian to get the same results.
Wild, S. (2026) Drowning in data sets? Here’s how to cut them down to size. Nature 651, 1121-1122.
“This is a problem that libraries have been dealing with for as long as libraries have existed,” says Kristin Briney, a librarian at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena. “We cannot physically collect all the books that we want to collect, and in 50 years, the book may not be useful any more.”
Data sets, she says, are the same. “There has to be some curation that determines what is worth keeping and what is worth throwing away.”
While I’m honored to share my voice among the many others that appear in these articles, mostly I’m excited to see Nature covering topics around data and librarianship. I hope that you check the articles out and enjoy the work of these amazing science journalists.
