The Project Formerly-Formerly Known as DRSR

“What’s in a name?  That which we call a rose by any other word would smell as sweet.”  –William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

As all of you know we’ve gone through several iterations of names for this project.  Our working title started out as “Digital Repository Services for Research,” but we always knew it wasn’t a name that we wanted to use for our end-users of the services we’re building and linking.  So we moved on to “Research Cloud Services,” something we felt might work better as a name for public consumption.  But that name never took off within Libraries or IT, and most of us went back to calling it DRSR or “DRSR or whatever we’re calling it these days.”  Some branding work on the IT-side of our project helped us see that we don’t need to name the suite of services for our users– they’ll be more concerned with the individual services than with how all of the services work together.  But we all need to understand these services as parts of a larger whole so that we might be better able to help researchers throughout the research lifecycle, so internally and when/if needed we’re back to DRSR for this project.  No more name changes.  We promise.

Author: Kara M Whatley

Kara Whatley is currently Head of Science and Engineering for the NYU Division of Libraries, a position she has held since 2014. She was previously Life Sciences Librarian and Head of the Coles Science Center at NYU’s Bobst Library. Kara holds a master’s degree in biological sciences from Texas Tech University, master’s degree in library and information studies from the University of Oklahoma, and a bachelor of arts in biology from Hendrix College. She is an active member of the American Library Association, where she held offices in the New Member Roundtable and the Association of College and Research Libraries’ Science and Technology Section. Her professional and research interests include mentoring opportunities for new library professionals, user behavior in virtual reference environments, and effective communication in libraries. Kara splits her time between NYU’s Bern Dibner Library, located in Downtown Brooklyn, and Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, NYU’s flagship library in Greenwich Village. View all posts by Kara M Whatley