Uncategorized – Page 2

JOB: Digital Collections Librarian, Union College (Schenectady, NY)

The Digital Collections Librarian manages the intake, maintenance, and sustainability of digitized materials that support the Schaffer Library digital collections program. As part of the Content & Digital Library Systems department, the incumbent works closely with colleagues to manage selected digital repository and digital preservation platforms, ensuring both a high degree of functionality, and that digital objects are available for research use in a variety of formats. This librarian serves as a resource for repository development and standards, and ensures that digitized and born-digital objects can be curated and maintained for short- and long-term access.

OPPORTUNITY: 2020 ADHO Communications Fellowships

The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) is seeking applicants for its two 2020 Communications Fellowships, each of which comes with a stipend of 500 Euros. The fellowship positions are for part-time, remote work, and entail 3-4 hours of work per week. While working on a small team directed by the ADHO Communications Officer, the fellows will work on the following areas, per the announcement:

write news releases, blog posts, and announcements about ADHO, its constituent organizations, and the broader digital humanities community

monitor and update ADHO’s social media presence

maintain its website

help to develop and implement ADHO’s outreach strategy

perform other communications-related responsibilities

The deadline to apply for these positions is March 1st, 2020. These positions are great for library students and professionals interested in learning more about ADHO, as well as gaining communications and service experience.

JOB: Immersive Technologies Librarian, University of Rochester

From the announcement:

The Immersive Technologies Librarian’s primary focus is the creation of Studio X, a program and space for students, staff, and faculty to augmented, extended, mixed, and virtual reality (XR) and related technologies. The purpose of Studio X is to inspire innovative and interdisciplinary engagement, and to facilitate the development of a rich community of practice for XR, an area that is a strategic research priority at the University of Rochester. With the support of a range of collaborators within the libraries and beyond, the Immersive Technologies a Librarian designs and delivers an exploratory program that introduces students and faculty to tools, approaches, and technologies that make up XR, with an eye towards transforming coursework, inspiring new research directions, and providing support to innovative student and faculty projects. The Immersive Technologies Librarian will be part of a team designing Studio X, which is set to open in 2020, and will take on the responsibility of designing and bringing programming and support services into the space.

POST: Digital Library Federation Names Three New “DLF Futures Fellows”

Digital Library Federation (DLF) named three distinguished fellows for its new DLF Futures fellowship program, which “offers financial support and a communications platform for mid-career digital library practitioners whose projects and areas of research open up new, perhaps unexpected possibilities and future directions for the field.”

From the post:

DLF’s 2018-19 Futures Fellows are Ana Ndumu of the University of Maryland College of Information, Santi Thompson of the University of Houston Libraries, and Hannah Scates Kettler of the University of Iowa Libraries. Through the course of the fellowship year, Ndumu, Thompson, and Scates Kettler will undertake projects that explore topics as diverse as the fostering of organizational partnerships between iSchools and historically black colleges and universities; more nuanced ways to measure and assess the transformative reuse of digital library content; and future applications for 3D cultural heritage visualization.

Welcome, Nickoal Eichmann-Kalwara and Sarah Melton, our new Review editors!

We are pleased to welcome Nickoal Eichmann-Kalwara and Sarah Melton to the dh+lib editorial team. Both will be serving as editors for the dh+lib Review.

Caitlin Christian-Lamb, Roxanne Shirazi, and Patrick Williams will continue to serve as Review editors, bringing our rotating team of editors for the weekly publication to five.

Nickoal Eichmann-Kalwara is the Digital Scholarship Librarian at University of Colorado Boulder, where she teaches digital research methods and supports digital scholarship projects and open scholarship practices. Her research interests include approaches to incentivizing open access, representation in digital humanities, and intersections of early modern history of crime, medicine, and eschatology. She holds an MLS from Indiana University and an MA in History from California State University, Fullerton. She has long served as an Editor-At-Large for the Review.

Sarah Melton is Head of Digital Scholarship at Boston College. Her group explores and documents new tools and supports teaching and research in a variety of areas that utilize broad methodologies in the digital humanities. She is interested in questions of digital infrastructure, the philosophical underpinnings of “openness,” and the intersection of public history and digital humanities. She has worked with Open Access Button for the past several years. Sarah holds a PhD from Emory University’s Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts.

Sarah and Nickoal help us to fill the vacancy left by former editor Caro Pinto, who worked on the Review for the past four years. We are incredibly fortunate to bring such exceptionally talented individuals to help guide and grow the dh+lib project. Stay tuned for further announcements about our future plans!

RESOURCE: Sustaining the Digital Humanities

A report recently released from Ithaka S+R, Sustaining the Digital Humanities: Host Institution Support Beyond the Start-up Phase, investigates different models of supporting DH, particularly around the concepts of service, lab, and network. The report is based on interviews with more than 125 individuals, and key findings include:

Faculty are not just using digital tools and content; many see themselves as creating them, too.
Even on campuses with designated DH centers, there is rarely an end-to-end solution in place to support faculty from planning, to building, to preservation and outreach.
Digital project leaders gravitate to whatever support they can find, piecing together funding here, consultation there.
Lack of clarity about how DH work and outputs support institutional aims and who should “own” these outputs makes it difficult for those planning deeper investments, whether in the form of a research support system including workshops and training, or as a more entrepreneurial lab effort for building new grant-supported works.

The report also includes a Sustainability Implementation Toolkit, “intended to guide faculty, campus administrators, librarians, and directors of support units as they seek solutions for their institutions.”

RESOURCE: A Draft Style Guide for Digital Collection Hypertexts

Trevor Owens (Library of Congress) offers a draft style guide for online collections that will be particularly useful for those responsible for creating and curating digital content (such as exhibits built in Omeka). Owens seeks to “take the ideas of exhibition and print publications that make extensive use of deep captions and figure out how they fit into the way the web writing works and people engage with the web.” He discusses nine central ideas:

Every narrative page stands on its own
Every caption should explicate/interpret the image/object presented
Object captions should always stand on their own
A new heading should break up text after every few paragraphs
An image from an item should always be visible as one scrolls through the page
Each page should be in the long blog post sweet spot–700-2000 words
Hyperlink text for connections and emphasis
Links should connect consistently connect out across subsections
Show parts of items, link out to whole items

JOB: Digital Humanities Specialist, Getty Research Institute

From the position announcement:

The Getty Research Institute (GRI) seeks a creative, technology-grounded person with a background in art history and/or computer science to conceptualize, advise, and coordinate digital humanities projects and collection digitization projects. Reporting to the GRI Deputy Director, the position will interact with a diverse range of collaborators including resident scholars, curators, research staff, librarians, technologists, and external partners to increase access to collections, develop new tools for using digital collections, and facilitate original art-historical research using digital resources. The Digital Humanities Specialist will recommend strategic directions, participate in prioritizing projects, research and recommend new technologies, track advancements in the field, manage project teams, and collaborate with external partners.

Make It New? A dh+lib Mini-Series — the ebook

I am pleased to present Make It New? A dh+lib Mini-Series the ebook. It is available for download in epub and pdf format.

This ebook is an experiment in publishing, demonstrating one way that openly-published works can be built upon and carried forward. It features the posts from Make It New? A dh+lib Mini-Series alongside the original Journal of Library Administration articles. Open access publishing allows us to invite our readers – all of them, regardless of their location relative to paywalls – to respond to the ideas presented in scholarly articles. Here, it has enabled us to repackage the articles and responses in a self-contained and more stable format for distribution. At this particular moment, where the work of publishers, libraries, and other like-minded institutions are overlapping in interesting ways, we need more experimental projects that explore the boundaries of what’s possible and what’s useful.

This work is a product of the collective effort of the authors and editors whose works are included– Barbara Rockenbach, Chris Alen Sula, Jennifer Vinopal, Monica McCormick, Miriam Posner, Bethany Nowviskie, Micah Vandegrift, Stewart Varner, Ben Vershbow, Sarah Potvin, Roxanne Shirazi, Devin Higgins, Kevin Butterfield, Trevor Muñoz, Nathaniel Gustafson-Sundell, Daniel Griffin, and Chella Vaidyanathan.

Special thanks go to Micah Vandegrift for his skillful negotiations with Taylor and Francis, which allowed the authors of the JLA articles to maintain copyright to their work. I am grateful to the JLA authors, all of whom have made peer-reviewed open access versions of their articles publicly available, for allowing us to include these works in this publication under a CC-BY-NC license. The authors of the dh+lib responses, all of which were published under Creative Commons licensing terms, were equally willing to participate in this experiment, and we thank them for making this possible. I particularly appreciate the help of Kevin Smith, Scholarly Communications Officer at Duke University, who helped elucidate the rights issues and claims embedded in this project.

Finally, I would be remiss not to give thanks to my dh+lib co-editors, Roxanne Shirazi and Sarah Potvin, whose consummate editorial work on the mini-series resulted in a delightfully thought-provoking set of work.

I hope you enjoy the works presented here. May you discover many answers, new questions, and find inspiration.