Welcome back to another installment of 5 Questions! If you would like to choose 5 Questions yourself, feel free to choose 5 from this form.

Joddy Marchesoni, Data Services Librarian

Tell us about what you do at ZSR Library?

Since this is a new role for ZSR (within DISC), I am working to establish new data services to help students and faculty learn to work with data and think critically about data, and help them learn to make decisions about their research data. This includes workshops and in-class instruction sessions, and personal research sessions with patrons (students and faculty). I’ve been taking referrals from liaison librarians on data requests from students and faculty to start building important relationships for data services. The goal is to become the go-to person in the library for these types of questions.

What is your favorite book/podcast/movie?

If you ask me for a favorite thing, I’ll give you at least 2, maybe even 20 🙂

Authors whose books are always amazing: Emily St. John Mandel, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Louise Penny, Shaun Tan, Lydia Davis, Haruki Murakami, Zadie Smith… I could go on but I’ll stop there.

Podcasts: Valley Heat, Anthropocene Reviewed, What Now? with Trevor Noah, 99% Invisible, The Heart (anything by Kaitlin Prest), Normal Gossip, Proxy (found this one through Normal Gossip last week, because they have amazing guests!).

Not that into movies so I’ll go with TV shows: Drops of God, anything with Nicola Walker (Unforgotten, Annika, The Split), Detectorists, Ghosts (British version), Counterpart, Twilight Zone (both Rod Serling’s and Jordan Peele’s).

What is your favorite project you have worked on in your career?

I worked on a project at NC State University Libraries to try to make it easier for students to find the Data Experience Lab in Hill Library. My team set up a scavenger hunt event in the library where we had students try to find the lab, and then asked them questions about how they’d use the lab when they got there. And then gave them free coffee and bagels 🙂 It was fun to see how they approached the hunt. Some of them went right for the Ask Us desk to talk to someone, some of them went for the interactive library map, and some just started wandering around the library. (We didn’t let them use their phone for the scavenger hunt, because we were focused on the physical space and how they navigated it).

We also posted QR codes in the lab for a survey for patrons who already use the space, with a backup laptop charger as a prize. We got over 50 responses to the survey, with about half of the students not even knowing there was a data science consultant service in the lab! Which was staffed by students and free to all, and the desk was right up front.

As a result of this project, we were able to work with the User Experience (UX) department to start making changes to signage to make the lab easier to find. It was a good feeling to engage with students to learn what they needed, and then take concrete steps with library staff to meet those needs. This whole project is documented on the NCSU library website.

What is one word that best describes your ZSR experience?

Supportive, engaging, and delightful (I couldn’t narrow it down to just one word! Are you kidding me!?!)

How did you start working in libraries?

I grew up in a library, so it was inevitable that I’d someday work in one. My mom was a circulation manager at Hunter Library at WCU, so I spent a lot of my childhood after school wandering the library. I can still picture the children’s mezzanine, the fun I had searching for kids’ books and running through the stacks. The circulation back office with all its handmade decorations, like animal sculptures made of dot matrix printer paper edges. Later, when I got to college at UNC, I was a work study assistant at the SILS Library, as I was discovering what I wanted to do. I didn’t become a librarian then, but many years (and many twists and turns) later, I started at NC State as a Data & Visualization Librarian. Since then, I’ve greatly enjoyed librarianship and feel that it was the right path for me all along!

Is there something you want to tell us about yourself?

My favorite hobby is drawing comics and illustrations, and growing up I wanted to become a cartoonist. For awhile, I was drawing plant portraits, where I caricatured my friends’ house plants. I like to illustrate stories around quotes and song lyrics, make up whimsical characters (like Stompy the elephant and Shadow the cat), and sketch New Yorker-style cartoons with (un)funny captions. At my last job I always had a dry erase drawing covering the entire whiteboard in my office, which I’d erase and start something new on every now and then. After my coworkers saw them, I started drawing comics and illustrations on other people’s boards too (if they wanted me to).