History#
Brief History of the UA Libraries Scholarly API Cookbook#
In late 2019, as Research Data Services was formalized within UA Libraries under the leadership of Dr. Kevin Walker, we developed an interest in supporting users with programmatic access to information through Scholarly APIs. During this time, Dr. Vincent Scalfani started writing Scholarly API tutorials related to chemistry and bibliographic APIs.
We soon saw the value in a broad range of disciplinary API tutorials and started a coordinated effort to create the UA Libraries Scholarly API Cookbook in 2021. We built a team of UA student developers, which quickly brought the Cookbook from an idea to a coordinated open education documentation project. Vishank Patel and Anastasia Ramig wrote the early Mathematica and MATLAB tutorials, respectively. Avery Fernandez set up the original Jupyter Book and automated builds on GitHub and wrote numerous Python and Bash tutorials (and later re-wrote many of them!). Adam Nguyen filled a gap in scripting languages by writing the first collection of R tutorials, and Cyrus Gomes translated tutorials to C.
There have been many other contributions from talented students including Sebastian Shirk, Jay Crawford, Nate Pedigo, and Michael Moen. In addition to contributing tutorials, in 2023, Michael started to lead the maintenance of the Cookbook, including testing, reviewing, merging contributions, and adding other improvements to the build workflow and metadata. By early 2025, we had approached nearly 100 tutorials across six different programming languages. We made the decision to archive many of the tutorials and focus our efforts on standardizing and maintaining the Python and R tutorials moving forward. Michael Moen has since led this Cookbook standardization effort and serves as our student lead maintainer for the Scholarly API Cookbook.
From 2021-2025, Dr. Vincent Scalfani supervised the day-to-day operations of the Scholarly API Cookbook, assisting students with code, use-case ideas, and final review. This supervisory role shifted to other Research Computing staff and faculty in 2025. Currently, Dr. Rachel DuBose and Dakeya Chambers lead the supervision and reviews for the Scholarly API Cookbook, with Chambers providing daily, hands on oversight throughout the process.