Love Data Week is an international celebration of data, held each year around Valentine’s Day. It’s an opportunity to reflect on the role data plays in research, teaching, and everyday decision-making—and to ask a deceptively simple question. This year’s theme, Where’s the Data?, invites us to think about where data comes from, how it moves, and what happens to it over time.
At the UTSC Library, Love Data Week is a moment to highlight the many ways we support researchers across the full research data lifecycle. From data management planning and secure storage to documentation, ethical sharing, and long-term preservation, the library works with researchers to ensure data remains usable, discoverable, and meaningful—both during a project and well beyond it. We also support researchers in finding, accessing, or developing datasets that can be reused by the broader scholarly community.
One way to build practical data skills is through Fun Data Fridays, an ongoing, hands-on workshop series hosted by the library. Open to all members of the U of T community, these sessions explore a wide range of topics, including working with spreadsheets, cleaning messy data, SQL, data visualization, mapping, qualitative analysis, and data storytelling. Whether you’re new to working with data or looking to deepen existing skills, the series offers a low-barrier, collaborative way to learn.
Beyond workshops, the library supports data discovery and preservation through services such as U of T Dataverse in Borealis, a secure, Canadian-based research data repository, and the Map & Data Library, which provides access to a wide range of spatial and statistical datasets. Together, these services help researchers locate data, share it responsibly, and preserve it for future use.
Whether you’re just getting started or following a complex data journey, the UTSC Library is here to help—wherever your data begins and wherever it needs to go. Researchers interested in learning more about library data services or exploring data-related collaborations are encouraged to contact their liaison librarian. Those interested in participating in Love Data Week workshops at the UTSC Library can register using the link below.