All of us at Research Data Services mourn the loss of our friend and colleague, Rebecca Holz, who passed away in late 2011.

Rebecca contributed immeasurably to RDS’s formative first year. She led the design and construction of our website, which has received kudos from research institutions across the United States. She poured energy into many meetings and training sessions with researchers in the School of Medicine and Public Health on data-management topics, and co-presented RDS’s first graduate seminar on the subject for the Graduate Seminar Series.

Research Data Services cannot but be altered by this heartbreaking loss. Nonetheless, we who remain hope to continue RDS’s work in a manner worthy of Rebecca’s keen, resourceful, and generous spirit.

Rebecca’s colleagues offer the following reminiscences.

Jan Cheetham

Rebecca was a founding member of the Research Data Services and important contributor to our campus response to the challenges of data stewardship. She was an information architect, an expert on open access and bibliometrics, a designer, an educator, and an IT professional who fearlessly experimented with social media, data mashups, and mobile devices. All these things she did under the simple title of “information architecture librarian.”

Personally, I will always think of Rebecca as a librarian “warrior.” At our team meetings, she was the quintessential problem solver at her laptop command station: banging out commands, plugging holes in code, tunneling through information at the speed of lightning, all while exchanging sardonic quips with her colleagues.

She was fast-firing, proactive, and always pushing for change. Rebecca was a librarian at a time when libraries, science, and higher education were undergoing transformation and upheaval brought on by information technology, data-driven research, and shrinking budgets. She embraced the possibilities brought by change. She was an outspoken advocate of open access, open data, and new ways to measure scholarly impact. And she was a champion of information technologies that push the boundaries of discovery and learning.

She was always wonderful to be around: endearing, playful, a wonderful listener, and a sparkling personality.

Ann M. Combs

At Ebling we all loved Rebecca and loved working with her. It’s such an incredible loss. Keep expecting to see her walk past our doors, smiling and nodding hello, skimming on by or stopping to chat. Librarian. Dog lover. Step-mom. Sweet gal. Carrying her coffee mug. On time for meetings. Effective. Open. Telling it like it is. Not cutting corners. Helping us. Seeing possibilities. Inspiring us on to the future. Good grief, we miss her.

Rebecca worked in so many areas, no one person could write a meaningful professional tribute.

Dorothea Salo

Rebecca Holz energetically championed initiatives for greater access to and preservation of research publications and data. I am immensely grateful for the smart, grounded presentation on bibliometrics Rebecca contributed to the one-day “Putting the Wisconsin Idea Online” symposium in 2010, as well as for her contributions to the founding of Research Data Services.

She came to me once to consult about the possibility of adding a campus-produced journal to PubMed Central, providing me a sample article to gauge the possibility of transforming the backfiles to NLM XML. I started on an XSLT stylesheet to accomplish the job, but gave up quickly, telling Rebecca I didn’t think it was possible given the journal’s existing production practices.

Rebecca asked me for the stylesheet; I gave it to her. Two days later, she emailed me confirming my conclusion—and explaining the amazing advanced XSLT work she had added to my hasty hack! I hadn’t realized she was so phenomenally skilled, she was so unassuming about her brilliance. I never forgot again.

I will miss her skill, pragmatism, and cheerful willingness to collaborate very, very much.

Amanda Werhane

It could have been me,
But instead it was you
So I’ll keep doing the work you were doing
As if I were two

—Holly Near, “It Could Have Been Me”