Academic Research Consulting & Services

Joe Aufmuth is UF Library’s Geospatial Consultant in the Library’s Academic Research Consulting and Services (ARCS) department.  He is also an affiliated faculty member in UF’s Geomatics Program where he earned his MS degree. Joe has 30⁺ years of combined academic and private consulting experience in the areas of Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Remote Sensing, and Global Positioning Systems (GPS). He consults with faculty, staff, and students on all aspects of creating or acquiring spatially referenced data, performing spatial analysis, and creating maps, as well as using applicable software and hardware.  Mr. Aufmuth has also taught GIS courses at UF for over 15 years.  Internationally, Joe has taught short courses in Tanzania, Ethiopia, and Egypt, and has presented papers in Hungary and Italy. Locally, Joe is known for having served on the Micanopy Town Commission for the past 20 years, 10 of those as the Town’s mayor. 

Tara Tobin Cataldo is the STEM Collections and Research Metrics Librarian in the UF Libraries. She directs the collections operations of the Marston Science Library, and serves on the group that manages the libraries multi-million dollar collections budget. Tara is an affiliate in the Academic Research and Consulting (ARCS) department and leads activities in Research Metrics and Impact. Her research focuses on the use of digital information and research metrics in higher education. Tara has her B.S. in Biology from the University of Tampa, her M.L.S. from the University of South Florida and she has been an academic librarian for over 25 years.

Perry Collins is a librarian and scholar based in Gainesville, FL. She is currently Chair, Academic Research Consulting and Services (ARCS), as well as Copyright and Scholarly Communications Librarian and tenured faculty at the University of Florida Libraries. Perry works closely with the Digital Library of the Caribbean, a 100-partner network devoted to preserving the cultural heritage of the Caribbean and Caribbean Diasporas, and is OER Editor for LibraryPress@UF, a collaborative digital publishing partnership between the Libraries and the University of Florida Press. Perry has been PI and co-PI on major grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Institute of Museum and Library Services, and Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. Previously, Perry was Sr. Program Officer at the National Endowment for the Humanities, where she worked in the Office of Digital Humanities from 2024-2025 and 2011-2017. In this role, she developed initiatives to better support digital sustainability, including leadership of the NEH Public Access Policy announced in 2024. As an academic librarian, Perry has held leadership roles within the field of library publishing; she recently served on the Board of the Library Publishing Coalition and co-edits the newly launched journal Case Studies in Library Publishing. Perry holds a M.L.I.S. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and M.A. in American Studies from the University of Kansas.

Valrie Minson serves as Associate Dean for Research and Interim Chair of the Academic Research Consulting & Services (ARCS) unit for the University of Florida Libraries. Minson has presented both nationally and internationally and her research agenda addresses data support services, collection management, collaboration and cyberinfrastructure, and specialized information services. Previously, she served as the Associate Dean of Assessment and Student Engagement and as Chair of the Marston Science Library, providing leadership for the only non-medical science library on campus, with 1.4 million visitors per year, supporting 42 departments across three colleges.

Dr. Javi Rudolph is the Computational Literacy Librarian at the George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida. Her work sits at the intersection of computational ecology, community ecology, data science, and decision support. She investigates how animal movement, infectious disease dynamics, and environmental change interact to shape ecosystems and resource management outcomes. By developing simulation-based and scenario forecasting models, Dr. Rudolph supports data-informed decision-making in both ecological and public health contexts.

Through her leadership in computational literacy, she builds bridges across disciplines, empowering students, researchers, and professionals to apply modeling, coding, and data science in their own fields. Her work advances research and training but also fosters a culture of computational confidence and collaboration that drives innovative, real-world solutions to environmental and societal challenges.

Terry Kit Selfe, DC, PhD is an experienced librarian and clinical investigator with specific expertise in the planning and execution of clinical trials involving mind-body therapies for chronic conditions related to aging and stress. She received a Doctor of Chiropractic degree from Palmer College of Chiropractic, and a PhD in Educational Research from the University of Virginia. She also completed an NIH-funded postdoctoral fellowship in clinical research at UVA’s Center for the Study of Complementary and Alternative Therapies. Dr. Selfe's research background serves her well in her current position as the Translational Research and Impact Librarian. As a member of the Academic Research Consulting and Services (ARCS) department she provides support and guidance to the entire UF community regarding publishing best practices, research impact, research integrity, and compliance with the NIH public access policy.

Borui Zhang is an NLP specialist at George A. Smathers Libraries, specializing in named entity recognition (NER), LLM fine-tuning for downstream tasks, information retrieval, data structuring, and feature engineering. Her work focuses on leveraging AI to enhance library services, research workflows, and interdisciplinary applications, aiming to develop systems that better understand and model both human language and domain-specific textual data.

With expertise in machine learning, Borui applies NLP techniques to analyze domain-specific data, including medical research, agriculture, biology, and digital collections, as well as low-resource languages such as Nepal Bhasa and Cantonese. Her goal is to create adaptable NLP systems that enhance research productivity, facilitate knowledge discovery, and support data-driven decision-making across disciplines.