Love Data Month: a Journey of Continuous Enhancement

This presentation material supports a workshop presented at the 2024 RIT & UR Staff Conference.

Since 2022, the University of Rochester River Campus Libraries have been engaging in Love Data Month, extending Love Data Week as an opportunity for the Data Team to collaborate with other departments to provide rich data programming. Under the theme “My Kind of Data”, Love Data 2024 continued this tradition, focusing on social events and skills workshops, which have been popular in the past.

Specifically, we hosted workshops on Metadata and Documentation, AI Ethics, ArcGIS, OpenRefine, and Excel, showed a documentary, orchestrated a faculty panel on DEIA research, held a data party, curated a book display on data and DEIA, and displayed data boards across numerous UR libraries. Despite the challenges, the month saw remarkable success with 320 registrations, 227 live attendees, and a 9.5/10 satisfaction score.

In this lighting talk, we discussed our programming efforts, reflect on the challenges and successes, share ideas to make the program more sustainable in the future, and examine the impact of our events on participants and the broader community.