In this role, he explores the application of the theories, principles, and practices of library science beyond the domain of traditional library work. In particular, Carlson seeks to increase the Purdue Libraries capabilities and opportunities to provide services supporting data-related research. Much of his work is done through direct collaborations and partnerships with research faculty. Carlson is one of the architects of the Data Curation Profiles Toolkit (http://datacurationprofiles.org) developed by Purdue and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the PI of the Data Information Literacy project (http://datainfolit.org) with Cornell University, the University of Minnesota and the University of Oregon.