Introduction

The University of Washington has been active in data-intensive science efforts for over a decade, both through the establishment of the eScience Institute (http://escience.washington.edu) as well as the University's participation in the Moore-Sloan Data Science Environment grant (http://msdse.org). These efforts have impacted the university environment in the areas of research, education and support services such as libraries. This chapter will explore the University of Washington Libraries in particular, considering the changes to services, strategies and infrastructure required to support students, staff and faculty pursuing data-intensive work.

There are three major takeaways:

• 1 Networking and collaboration are essential to provide support for data science.

• 2 Support for data science can be provided with a variety of staffing, expertise and funding models – as long as there is administrative support as well as a culture of networking and collaboration.

• 3 The evolution in library services and interdepartmental relationships will continue, making agility and responsiveness essential to the continued relevance and success of libraries.

Background

The University of Washington (UW) is well known for its computer science and engineering programs (www.usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/topscience-schools/computer-science-rankings) and is regularly ranked as one of the US's premier research-intensive universities (www.cs.washington.edu/about_us). The growth of massive data collection and the study of those collections led to the founding of the UW's eScience Institute in 2008. Founders included former UW provost Mark Emmert, Ed Lazowska from Computer Science and Engineering, Tom Daniel from Biology and Werner Steutzle from Statistics. Although the key personnel have changed over time, the commitment from a variety of departments remains strong.

The goal of the eScience Institute was to provide a new home for researchers from varied UW departments to work together on data-intensive research. As stated in the Institute's mission:

The Institute brings together expertise and people from around UW to collaborate, educate and inform each other, while advancing the field of data science – all without allegiance to one particular discipline or department.