Lindsay Biography

Greetings! My name is Lindsay Gypin, she/her. I grew up in Denver, Colorado and began my career as a K-12 educator. I taught high school English and worked as a school librarian before becoming disillusioned with the politicization of public education and determining my skills were better suited for work in public libraries. Attending library school after having worked in libraries for so many years, I found myself drawn to courses in the research data management track of librarianship, and in qualitative research methods. Although I greatly enjoy working with youth (especially storytime, despite my initial aversion to it,) I decided to focus my efforts on effecting change at the systemic level, through research, scholarship, and working with future leaders, rather than the individual level, by working with youth in public libraries. I recently became a Data Services Librarian at the University of North Carolina Greensboro, where I hope to assist scholars in making their research data more open and accessible.

In my personal life, I played roller derby for nearly a decade. I quit when the combined commitment of school and derby became too intense to be successful in both. The roller derby community is a highly diverse international community, and through the personal connections I made, I saw firsthand the effects of white supremacy culture. I discovered that I had been complicit in racism, sexism, and homophobia and have been striving to do better, to help others do better, and to break down systems of oppression. For some time, I have wanted to build a reproducible workflow to uncover systemic bias in library catalogs. I’m hoping the Fellows Programme will help me build the foundation to do so.

Although I developed baseline skills in open science and reproducibility in library school, my path wasn’t as linear as many of my colleagues. Transitioning to my new role as a Data Services Librarian, I have found my open science skills to be a bit rusty. I was excited to discover the Frictionless Data Fellowes Programme’s aligned with my own: to make data more open, accessible, and reproducible. It also provides an opportunity to practice data science skills in a collaborative environment with some accountability. I am looking forward to learning with the other frictionless data fellows and from the frictionless community. Thanks, and may the force be with you.