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
-
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.
-
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.
-
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
-
Rebuilding a Carpentries lesson on software citation taught me that the reframe that mattered wasn't a new standard. It was retargeting the whole lesson from researchers publishing their own code to librarians advising other people's.
-
The single underscore that broke my task system
A CLI task manager that worked fine in my terminal silently failed inside Claude Code sessions. The cause wasn't a bug in the tool, it was a shell-snapshot mechanism that quietly drops single-underscore function names before the agent ever sees them.
-
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.