I'm Tim Dennis. I've spent 26 years in the UC system building research data infrastructure that keeps running after the grant ends, after the staff turns over, after the priorities shift.
I run the UCLA Library Data Science Center. This is where I write about what that work actually takes.
Recent writing
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Building Programs That Outlast Their Founders
Most library programs die when the person who built them leaves. The ones that survive are not better — they are differently structured. Here is what that structure looks like.
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What Research Data Infrastructure Requires from Library Leadership
Research data infrastructure is not an IT problem. It is a scholarly stewardship problem — and libraries are uniquely positioned to lead it, but only if we're willing to be more than service providers.
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From Teaching Workshops to Building Research Infrastructure
How eight years of work at UCLA evolved from teaching data skills to building the systems that make open, sustainable research possible.
Notes
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How I run three LLMs without getting burned
Claude, ChatGPT, and NotebookLM each do different work in my writing. The thing that keeps them useful is not the model. It's a verification habit borrowed from the reference desk: every claim gets ground-truthed before it ships.
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Giving our lesson catalog real metadata
A couple weeks ago I noticed our OSPO lesson catalog leaned hard toward one pathway. This week I went in and fixed the metadata underneath it. The cleanup taught me more than the result did.
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A working list of learn-by-doing open source resources
Gathering the interactive, guided, and gamified resources for learning open source and DevOps skills — the kind that teach by doing, like swirl did for R. A starting list to bring to the UC OSPO education group.