Recorded Program
This program will feature a panel of librarians involved in the provision of digital scholarship services. Their presentations will highlight a range of opportunities for technical services' contribution to this emerging field of librarianship. The speakers will provide case studies that will stimulate ideas between digital scholarship librarians and individuals in areas such as collections and metadata services, and ways to collaborate in support of new forms of faculty and student scholarship.
Presentation Abstracts
Matt Carruthers, University of Michigan
“Connecting the Dots: Using Digital Scholarship Methods to Facilitate New Modes of Discovery in Special Collections”
A team from the University of Michigan Library, consisting of members from Technical Services, Special Collections, and the Research division, has been exploring a framework for fostering new and original research in Special Collections by incorporating digital scholarship methods. We utilize existing metadata from Special Collections finding aids, along with openly available digital scholarship tools, to identify and visualize hidden connections and social networks among creators of our archival collections. This new information can serve as a novel and innovative resource to help guide further research with Special Collections materials. We have developed a proof of concept for a service model through which customized visualizations can be created for researchers according to their individual research questions. This presentation will discuss the methodology and tools we are using, as well as our goals for piloting the service.
Laurie Allen, University of Pennsylvania
“New Kinds of Collections: New Kinds of Collaborations”
Beginning in late November of 2016, faculty, grad students, and librarians at University of Pennsylvania began building collaboration to create a safer infrastructure for federal environmental and climate data. The collaboration grew to support 50 events with thousands of participants around the country, and engaged many dozens of libraries and librarians in imagining new kinds of collections in response to an urgent need. The collection we were trying to build, a copy of all federal data, is mammoth (and, of course, unrealistic) but brought forward new kinds of collaborations within the Penn Libraries, across the University, and with a huge range of national and international collaborators. The large group included catalogers, digital preservation specialists, library leaders, humanists, scientists and others. In this session, we’ll dig into the nitty gritty of collaboration across departmental and institutional boundaries in support of a giant project. What kinds of skills were needed? How were they marshalled? What kinds of collaborations worked best within a single institution, and when did cross-institutional work turn out to be easier? We’ll talk through how various professional specialties and communities approach collaboration, and what lessons can be drawn for building new kinds of collections in the future.
Amy Hunsaker and Dana Miller, University of Nevada, Reno
“Once Upon a Name in the West: Name Authority Work as a Collaborative Experiment”
The UNR Libraries Digital Initiatives Team has been exploring ways to create interactive digital collections and exhibits that focus on unique Nevada holdings. Digital Initiatives has supported Nevada-centric scholarship efforts by hosting a variety of formats including scanned photographs, text, and sheet music, recorded sound, and video. To this end, Digital Initiatives has collaborated with the Metadata and Cataloging and Special Collections Departments to pilot name authority workflows for personal, corporate, and place names that appear in digital collections but not in the published collections that catalogers regularly handle.
In January 2017, the Metadata and Cataloging Department and representatives from Digital Initiatives and Special Collections attended formal NACO (National Authority Cooperative) program training and UNR Libraries became the first NACO contributing library in the state. This presentation will focus on the values and workflows that allow our departments to collaborate for better name authority control of unique Nevada names in digital collections. Our efforts to embrace authority work in digital scholarship will lead to a better future for any linked data projects we might embark on in the future, as well as bring to light many more figures from Nevada history and culture.
Program Objectives:
At the end of this program, participants will...
(1) understand the opportunities and challenges to such digital scholarship/technical services collaboration
(2) have ideas on how to foster such collaboration
(3) recognize the kinds of skills, soft and hard, that can facilitate partnering on innovative research projects
Target Audience:
This program is intended for digital scholarship librarians, metadata librarians, instruction librarians, instructional technologists, web development librarians, and library administrators.
Co-sponsored by LITA, ACRL Digital Humanities Interest Group, and ALCTS CaMMS
Meeting Type: Program
Content Area: Transforming: E-Books & Collections
Interests: Collection Development, Digital Libraries, Institutional Repositories, Instruction, Scholarly Communication
Type of Library: Academic, Public, Research Library, Special
Sponsors: ALCTS
Cost: Included with full conference registration.
Open/Close: Open
Laurie Allen
Assistant Director for Digital Scholarship
University of Pennsylvania Libraries
Matt Carruthers
Metadata Projects Librarian
University of Michigan
Amy Hunsaker
Digital Initiatives Librarian
University of Nevada, Reno
Dana Miller
Head of Metadata and Cataloging Dept.
University of Nevada, Reno Libraries