BIG IDEAS demand reliable information. The University Libraries supports scholarship, research, and learning at UT by acquiring, organizing, preserving, and facilitating access to the world’s knowledge. The wide-ranging expertise of our librarians might surprise you.

This semester we begin a series of profiles of UT Knoxville librarians. Watch for a new profile each week.

As Data Curation Librarian, Chris Eaker supports UT researchers in the search for external funding. Chris helps faculty formulate the data management plans required by many grant-funding agencies. He can help researchers plan for data preservation, access, and sharing. He is knowledgeable about existing data repositories serving the various academic disciplines and can help faculty discover relevant existing data sets as well as making UT researchers’ own data more widely available for use by other researchers.

He is available to serve as a member of grant teams and invites researchers to contact him early in the proposal preparation process. He welcomes opportunities to help faculty include data stewardship in their teaching.

Chris is vice-chair of the DataONE Users Group. DataONE (Data Observation Network for Earth) is a National Science Foundation-funded project to archive environmental data produced by scientists around the world.

Chris is also the Learning, Research, and Collections Librarian for Architecture and Design, providing research consultations, information literacy instruction, and collection development in those disciplines.

Chris holds a bachelor’s degree in civil and environmental engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology and a master’s degree in information science from UT. Chris has almost ten years’ experience as a practicing civil engineer and specialized training in data curation.