Curriculum Vitae

Background

Ryan E. Johnson is a librarian with experience in metadata, data analytics, data curation, and data science. He also is a part-time instructor, teaching library science courses at the Master’s level.

Originally from Los Angeles, Ryan received his Master’s from Syracuse University in Library and Information Science, with a specialization in Digital Libraries. While currently occupied with the world of metadata, he is interested in any position with data cleaning and transformation, data analysis, building ontologies, and collaborating with others to provide people with excellent, relevant information.

Research Interests and Expertise

Metadata reconciliation to linked data using data-driven methods, data analytics, RDF and ontology design, scripting and applying data science methods for metadata analysis, instructional techniques for teaching software and data skills to information professionals.

Experience

Metadata Librarian and Data Curation Specialist, UC San Diego
Rank: Assistant Librarian
2014 - 2020

As a member of the Digital Object Metadata unit in the Geisel Library, I cleaned, mappped, and transformed metadata from data providers to align with the data model of our Digital Collections, also known as the DAMS (Digital Asset Management System). I was the sole Metadata Analyst on dozens digital collections, ranging from Special Collections papers to protein sequencing analysis research. I helped to refine and plan new data models and ontologies for the DAMS that better take advantage of Linked Data best practices, and decisions from communities (for example the Samvera and Fedora communities) have agreed upon.

I also helped streamline digital collection publication, which went from a project-specific customization that took on average many months (sometimes a year), to a standard process taking mere weeks. This streamlining required planning and collaborating with IT to develop ingest tools that could handle MARC, AT, and Excel source metadata into what we refer to as ‘input streams.’

For context, the UC San Diego Digital Collections are composed of a custom backend, with other technologies like Blacklight and Solr. The metadata I most commonly worked with was serialized in RDF/XML, but I am comfortable in many different serializations of RDF. I worked with many sources of data, including MARC, JSON (via data from APIs), XML, and tabular data. I utilized python tools such as Jupyter Lab and pandas in order to work with data cleaning and transformation at scale, and to enable reproducibility.

Metadata Assistant, Hamilton College
2011-2013

As part of the Digital Humanities Initiative (DHi), I provided metadata expertise to faculty’s Digital Humanities projects, which included work with MODS, RDF/XML, and encoding text into TEI. Hamilton was one of the early adopters of Islandora and the Fedora/Islandora/Drupal stack. I helped develop metadata entry forms, based on an Islandora module, aimed at researchers for self-deposit of their metadata, which required XPath/XQuery knowledge and collaboration with the Islandora community.

Metadata Assistant, Cornell Institute for Social and Economic Research (CISER)
Summer 2011
As an intern, I was tasked with providing metadata for CISER’s burgeoning online data portal. Harnessing the physical codebooks on site, and reconciling to online sources like ICPSR. During my short internship, I vastly increased the amount of metadata present in the repository.

Quality Assurance Tester, PC Games Division, THQ Inc.
2006-2007
As a quality assurance tester for the now-defunct video games publisher THQ, I tested PC games and logged any errors in a database, taking note of local environment and steps to reproduce the bugs. During ‘crunch’ times, I worked overtime and even doubletime in order to meet publishing deadlines. I was offered a permanent position, but declined in order to return to my education.

Education

Syracuse University
M.S., Library and Information Science (2012)
2010-2012

California State University, Northridge
B.A., Interdisciplinary Humanities (2009)
2008-2009

University of California, Santa Barbara
2000-2005

Publications

Books

Conference Presentations

Co-presenter: Poster “Keeping up with the Carpentries,” with co-presenters Reid Otsuji and Stephanie Labou. RDAP Summit, 2019

Co-presenter: “Simplifying Rights and Copyright in Samvera,” with co-presenters Arwen Hutt and Matt Critchlow. DLF Forum, 2015

Technical Skills and Expertise

  • Expertise in multiple metadata standards and frameworks, including MODS, MADS, METS, RDF (and serializations), EAD, schema.org, as well as application profiles
  • Experience creating and developing metadata standards, ontologies, application profiles, and data modeling
  • Expertise in data analysis to support stakeholders’ and business needs (Python, R, SQL, Tableau and data visualization in Python and R)
  • Capable of teaching beginner courses in data science and data analytics software (e.g. beginner Python, data cleaning, git, SQL)
  • Knowledge of linked data theories and methods, especially as it relates to library data and ontologies
  • Data cleaning and metadata enrichment expertise, especially adding linked data
  • Data transformation and enhancement through OpenRefine, APIs (parsing JSON), SPARQL and SQL queries, and XSL-T
  • Intermediate scripting and regular expression knowledge (Python, R, shell)
  • Creating static web pages for documentation via GitHub Pages and ReadTheDocs, harnessing Jekyll, Markdown, GitHub, etc. for rapid and iterative deployment
  • File management and version control software (git and GitHub), especially as it relates to data management and collaboration
  • Basic LAMP (also Nginx) server administration
  • Experience in the Fedora/Islandora/Drupal stack as well as the Fedora/Samvera/Blacklight stack; involved in the Samvera and Hyrax communities
  • Archival-quality digitization, scanning, and description experience
  • Basic database administration experience (MySQL, SQL Server, Postgresql)
  • Comfortable with software testing in support of rapid deployment and agile/iterative design methods as well as ticketing software (JIRA, Redmine)
  • Experience with many Linux (esp. Ubuntu) flavors, comfortable with virtual machines and environments (VirtualBox, Vagrant, Docker, Anaconda)