Category: Resource

RESOURCE: Keeping Up With…Digital Humanities

The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) has launched a new online publication called Keeping Up With…, appearing monthly and designed to introduce timely topics to academic librarians. The inaugural issue features Digital Humanities, and is filled with links to resources, tools,  and opportunities for self-learning. Written by Jennifer L. Adams and Kevin B. Gunn (both at Catholic University of America Libraries), Keeping Up WIth…Digital Humanities introduces DH to a general, non-specialized library audience and situates it within the broader concerns of the academy.

RESOURCE: Group and Method: Collaboration in the Digital Humanities

Last week dh+lib featured a post from Caro Pinto that explored collaboration in the digital humanities in the context of librarian-faculty relationships.

Now, Lisa Spiro has made available a PDF of the slides from a recent talk given at Case Western Reserve University’s Freedman Center Colloquium on “Exploring Collaboration in Digital Scholarship.” As she explains on her blog, Spiro “discussed why collaboration is so common in digital humanities (although of course not all DH work is necessarily collaborative); explored the significance of collaboration in projects to build digital resources, devise new research methods, and promote participatory humanities; and explored challenges to collaboration.”

 

RESOURCE: NYPL Releases API

The New York Public Library was busy last week. In addition to announcing support for the DPLA, NYPL also released its Digital Collections API (Application Programming Interface), which allows users to submit large (and small) queries against the metadata for NYPL’s online collections. The API exposes the metadata, distributed under a CC0 license, for over 1 million objects and returns data in either XML or JSON format.

The API was created by NYPL’s Information Technology Group to help support the string of innovative projects coming from NYPL Labs, such as the Menus Project and Direct Me NYC 1940. On releasing the API, David Riordan, product manager for NYPL Labs, explains, “As a public library, we felt a responsibility to make this same data available to the public.”

RESOURCE: Copyright Catalogs in the Internet Archive

The U.S. Copyright Office has added to the Interent Archive seven volumes of Catalogs of Copyright Entries (CCE), which were published by the Copyright Office from July 1891 through December 1977. The CCE volumes contain data on copyright registration, and are a useful tool for tracking down copyright owners.

Although the current collection is simply digitized versions of the print catalogs, the Copyright Office has long-term plans to turn these records into a searchable database, and they are accepting capability statements from groups that are able to undertake this project.

RESOURCE: US Faculty Survey 2012

Where do you start your research? How important is digital research and methodologies to your current research? How do you prefer to share your research?

These are some of the questions asked of U.S. faculty in Ithaka S+R’s Faculty Survey 2012. Published every three years since 2000, the survey aims to “provide colleges and universities, libraries, learned societies, and academic publishers with insight into the evolving attitudes and practices of faculty members in the context of substantial environmental change for higher education.” Key findings from the 2012 survey were released April 5 at CNI’s closing plenary; full results were published online on April 8.

While many of the findings may not be groundbreaking to librarians, it is nonetheless crucial to understand how faculty perceive the library. One strength of the survey is its large sample size – over 5,000 responses from faculty in all disciplines and types of institution. Further coverage of the survey results is available in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Library Journal, and Inside Higher Ed, among others.

RESOURCE: Open Monograph Press 1.0

The Public Knowledge Project has announced the release of Open Monograph Press in 1.0. OMP is a free, open-source platform: “for managing the editorial workflow required to see monographs, edited volumes, and scholarly editions through internal and external review, editing, cataloguing, production, and publication.” In developing OMP as a new module, PKP has also provided a basis for the transition and redesign of their Open Journal System and Open Conference System software. (For a recent review of Open Conference System, see Melanie Schlosser’s “Conference publishing pilot” post on Ohio State University’s Digital Scholarship @ The Libraries blog.)

 

RESOURCE: Scalar

Is it a book? A website? Scalar, developed by the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture, was just openly released in beta, with access via the Scalar servers. The platform aims to provide a platform for multimodal scholarship, liberating authors from linear structures and plugin-heavy platforms to enable “long-form, born-digital scholarship online.” This free, user-friendly, open-source platform features an RDF content model and a built-in API. Publications created using Scalar in alpha release are featured on the site.

RESOURCE: Announcing a Free “Personal Digital Archiving” Publication

The Library of Congress has released a free PDF compilation of key blog posts from its digital preservation blog, The Signal. Intended as “a primer for the digital archive novice, as well as a refresher for those with more experience,” the publication addresses the challenges that individuals face in preserving their personal digital content.

The content in Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving is grouped under three general headings:

  • Personal Digital Archiving Guidance: including tips for preserving digital photographs, personal archiving in the cloud, how to get your digital affairs in order, and others.
  • Personal Reflections on Personal Digital Archiving: tales of personal experience (either saving or losing digital material)
  • Personal Digital Archiving Outreach: reports of presentations, events and campaigns held both at the Library of Congress and elsewhere.

RESOURCE: Austin College Digital Humanities Colloquium Wrap-up

As part of a 2012-13 Mellon Foundation planning grant in the Digital Humanities, Austin College convened a Digital Humanities Colloquium, February 19 through February 21, 2013.

In February, Austin College hosted a Digital Humanities Colloquium as part of a 2012-13 Mellon Foundation planning grant. Matthew Windsor (Visiting Librarian at Hendrix College) has shared a recap on Eduhacker highlighting the key points of each session along with links to projects, tools, and Colloquium highlighted issues of relevance to the intersection of DH and libraries, particularly in the context of liberal arts colleges. Kevin L. Smith, Scholarly Communications Officer at Duke, spoke about “Copyright and Publishing in the Digital Humanities”; Bob Kieft, College Librarian at Occidental College, addressed the challenge of “Re-Mediating the College Library”; and Angel Nieves, Co-Director of the Digital Humanities Initiative at Hamilton College, emphasized the need for, in Windsor’s words, “deep collaboration with administrators, galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAM) for DH projects.”

RESOURCE: Women’s Studies, Gender Studies and DH

NITLE webinar by Jacqueline Wernimont on 27 February 2013 http://www.nitle.org/live/events/159-womens-studies-gender-studies-and-digital

There’s been some great activity around women’s studies and gender studies in DH in the past week. On Wednesday, Jacqueline Wernimont, Assistant Professor of English at Scripps College, hosted a NITLE online seminar on the topic (slides and Storify available), and provided a follow-up on some of the ideas raised during the conversation. The seminar also resulted in a Google Doc that’s chock full of projects, sites, articles, and organizations that are actively shaping women’s studies and gender studies in the digital humanities.