UH Librarians Make Connections
UH librarians facilitate faculty research.
Lisa Martin, business, economics and hospitality librarian, and Josh Been, social science data librarian, were able to facilitate the research process for two economics faculty members. Andrea Szabo and Gergely Ujhelyi needed normalized India elections data for their project. They asked the library to acquire this very expensive data from a company in India.
Martin and Been decided to come at the problem from a different angle. Previously, Been had worked with a political science faculty member, Ryan Kennedy, on a similar project. In fact, Kennedy had normalized the needed data already.
The data that Been already had located for Szabo’s and Ujhelyi’s project needed to be reformatted to work with the additional data from Kennedy’s research. He was able to accomplish this using ArcGIS, a geographic information system for working with maps and geographic information. Been then connected the two economics faculty members with Kennedy so they could access his data for their project.
Librarians help faculty with their research by making connections between people and information. Sometimes they save time and money as well.