On April 2, 2025, more than 400 Cornell community members gathered to examine individual and collective responsibility regarding how data are stored, used, interrogated, and verified. The day was spent bringing together the community to seriously explore and discuss the critical role of data in research, teaching and learning, higher education, and society. 

In his welcome, Chief Information Officer Ben Maddox noted that Cornell began collecting data over 160 years ago in its earliest classroom interactions between faculty and students.

“Today, we’re going to be talking about trust and data and tools for a changing world,” said Maddox. “The fact that there is now more data collected on the devices we hold in our hands than in a data center 15 years ago is an astounding evolution of the role of data in society.”

Librarians in the Digital Age

Opening the talks, Elaine Westbrooks reflected on the responsibilities of librarians to archive data in a way that preserves it and keeps it accessible for the long term. Westbrooks, Cornell’s Carl A. Kroch University Librarian, said librarians know that data loss is inevitable, but they remain focused on the big picture of long-time preservation of materials.

She said, "When we acquire things in the library, we don't always know how they're going to be used. They can be used by a whole different set of researchers in different disciplines. When you acquire something in the 1800s and look at it in 2025, it's a very different environment, a different historical context."

Anyone thinking about administrative and operational data will recognize the challenge libraries face in capturing data that will later be dated or seen differently contextually. Adding to that complexity is how ephemeral data feels today when viewed through lenses like search engines and changing technologies. 

“To steward, archive, curate, preserve, and care for data for today and future generations is work that we take very seriously. It's our mission to preserve human knowledge, and particularly the scholarly record,” said Westbrooks.

She also spoke of balancing stewardship, persistence, and adaptability with the demands of serving as a research library.

“We have to consistently be impactful, add value, and make sure that when people come to Cornell, they actually get a better education because we have a wonderful world-class library with world-class librarians and archivists who are defining what it means to be a library in a digital age. We’re that ship built not to just sit close to the shore but to go out into the rough waters. That is how we innovate and how we change the profession,” she said.

Evolving Norms and Context

Lee Humphreys, Chair of the Department of Communication in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, picked up the theme by stating there is no perfect data. “I would argue that there’s good data and worse data and what we want is to help create and store more trustworthy data,” said Humphreys.

Drawing on examples from a 2001 study and a repeated 2017 study comparing how people use their cell phones in public spaces, Humphreys described four criteria that help make data trustworthy: the data is accurate or credible, reflexive, transparent, and collaborative. Research fundamentally involves trying to disprove your own data before trusting it. Studying the same things over time allowed her to better see how data is contextual, and revealed the need to think carefully about how the context shapes the data and how researchers think about the data.

“As the number of people who had access changed, and what we could do with the technology changed, the norms around usage also changed,” said Humphreys. 

Sharing Data Across Institutions

Shifting to medical records in a complex healthcare environment, Weill Cornell Medicine’s Chief Research Informatics Officer, Tom Campion, described how the norms of usage have shifted over time.

“One of our colleagues, David Vaudry, said data moves at the speed of trust, and that is so central to what we can and cannot do with data,” said Campion. His multiple areas of responsibility include dual reporting roles in the Office of the Senior Associate Dean for Clinical Research and the Information Technologies & Services Department. He also leads a program that matches scientists with tools and services to apply electronic patient data in research and enable scientific workflows.

Campion explained the complex environment of two medical schools –Cornell and Columbia—sharing admitting privileges at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital. Each institution used a separate system for electronic health records. For ten years, the three institutions negotiated the use of a single system. 

“How do institutions establish and memorialize trust? They sign a legal agreement,” said Campion. Today, Epic –the electronic health records system that originally rolled out to all Weill physician offices in the 1990s under Global Chief Information Officer Curt Cole’s direction—has been extended across all three institutions.

 “That groundwork to share data, that establishment of trust, enabled us to make data move at the speed of trust and enabled us to establish a suite of tools and services for doing exactly that,” Campion said.

More Details

Complementing the guest speaker insights, a rich collection of poster and breakout session presentations further explored aspects of capturing, managing, and using data in a trusthworthy manner. Themes included the connection between philanthropy and gamification, storage and management options ranging from desktop solutions to a data lakehouse, and how to securely work with health and other sensitive data.

In the afternoon, Campion, Humphreys, and Westbrooks engaged in a panel discussion centered on the recurring themes of context, consent, and the synergy between human and machine learning. The panel was moderated by Maddox and included questions from the audience. 

For more details, watch the event page for links to photos and recordings of all the talks, posters, and breakout sessions.