Category: Post

JSTOR Daily recently published a blogpost, “Using Data to Discover and Explore the Stories of Enslaved People.” Written by Daryle Williams (Professor of History and serves as Dean of the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (CHASS) at the University of California, Riverside) and Kristina E. Poznan (Clinical Assistant Professor of History at the University of Maryland and Managing Editor of Enslaved.org’s Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation), the post explores the range of resources available for studying the history of enslaved people via Enslaved: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade (enslaved.org).

As the post points out,

Since the early modern era, Black and Indigenous slavery has been a recurrent, deeply unsettled subject of humanistic inquiry, across the disciplines of history, philosophy, letters, and the arts. While racial slavery has played the role of spectral scourge across the Western canon, racialized bondage often consigned actual enslaved Black and Indigenous persons to the margins of the written, visual, and sound record. Yet those silences were never complete and enslaved voices are to be found in the analog archive, book, image, and musical score.

Slavery as problem and as lived experience developed with print capitalism, humanistic scholarship, and the creative arts. Since the advent of humanities computing and the continual improvements in digital infrastructure that can accommodate the massive scale and scope of the historical archive, the study of Black and Indigenous bondage have also made significant inroads into information and data sciences in the academy as well as the private sector of online genealogy, genetic sequencing, and digital entertainment. From the punch cards of early computers to CDs to cloud storage, multimedia hardware and information processing applications power the storage, conservation, retrieval, duplication, and analysis of millions of documents and billions of data points about enslaved people, their conditions, and their voices—even if fragmented by racialized violence and its archival afterlives.

The post reflects on the growth of digital archival material available to researchers, and includes examples of some of those sources. The post includes links to resources that will be of use to digital humanities library professionals working on and/or teaching about the history of enslavement.

Source: Auto Draft

In the latest issue of the Data Sitters Club, “The Data-Sitters’ HathiTrust Mistake,” Cadence Cordell, Quinn Dombrowski, and Glen Layne-Worthey, reflect on their history and experiences with using the HathiTrust Digital Library and offer instructions on using the HathiTrust Research Center’s tools for creating and analyzing text corpora. This is an equally entertaining and instructive read for librarians, DH practitioners, and students alike.

Writing for the Association of Research Libraries, Cynthia Hudson-Vitale (Penn State) shared details of the Community Standards for 3D Preservation (CS3DP) Initiative. Developed in response to the growth of 3D technologies, including 3D modeling and virtual reality, CS3DP “aims to be an open, radically inclusive, and collaborative community invested in creating standards. Composed of working groups from national and international participants, the CS3DP community has increased awareness and accelerated the creation and adoption of best practices, metadata standards, and policies for the stewardship of 3D data.” Launched in 2018 with an IMLS grant, CS3DP aims to “ensure enduring access to 3D data … [and] articulate and address the shared challenges of documentation, access, and preservation.”

Co-principal investigators/organizers, Jennifer Moore, (Washington University in St. Louis University Libraries), Adam Rountrey (University of Michigan), and Hannah Scates Kettler (Iowa State University), have been building a community of practitioners. They started by surveying “experts in institutions who work with 3D data, both as creators in a variety of disciplines and stewards. Survey results overwhelmingly demonstrated that there were no shared standards or best practices to ensure the data type could persist. The other main takeaway was that people wanted this guidance and were willing to work together to create it.”

The Association of College and Research Libraries will be publishing 3D Data Creation to Curation: Building Community Standards for 3D Data Preservation in 2021. The book will “help inform practices and policies for 3D data creation and preservation,” according to Scates Kettler. This book and the broader community will help DH library folks who support 3D data projects, whether created in the library or by researchers and faculty.

As part of Practitioner Perspectives: Developing, Adapting, and Contextualizing the #DLFteach Toolkit, a blog series from DLF’s Digital Library Pedagogy group highlighting the experiences of digital librarians and archivists who utilize the #DLFteach Toolkit and are new to teaching and/or digital tools, Jeanine Finn (Claremont Colleges Library) has authored a post on “Participatory Mapping In a Pandemic.” Utilizing Google Sheets, ArcGIS StoryMaps, and ArcGIS Online, the lesson incorporates collaborative and student-centered ethos while introducing learners to geospatial analysis concepts with meaningful engagement through personal and library research.

Aaron Tay (Singapore Management University) has authored a post, “Why Open Access definitions are confusing,” on his blog. Tay lays out areas of Open Access (OA) that he has found confusing personally, in the hopes of elucidating others:

Rather, as open access categories start to get more nuanced and granular, our attempts to force open access definitions into singular colors/metal labels such as  (Green, Gold, Bronze, Platinum) and act like they all differ in just one dimension is overly simplistic, when in fact the definitions vary on multiple dimensions.

The post details “disagreements” in OA about goals, methods, and even facts around how OA works and how it functions in the wider scholarly publishing universe. As an academic librarian, Tay notes that understanding the different types of OA is key to his job and the future of libraries in general, but also notes the complicated and shifting nature of versions of OA:

The other major drawback of adopting one best OA version method is that this best OA label might shift over time. As the Unpaywall developer notes, insisting on a best OA label can result in colors shifting from say Green to Bronze or Green to Bronze as copies drop in and out… Part of why we got into this mess is because we decided the OA colors are distinct categories like the way real colors are. When in fact they overlap in a lot of ways. Green, Gold, Bronze, Hybrid OA do not measure or vary on just one dimension, but on several, so you can’t just compare them directly and choose the “best” one.

Tay closes by saying he primarily wrote this post to try to sort out his own thoughts and confusion, but dh+lib readers might find the threads he’s tracking of interest to their work as well.

Eileen Jakeway (Library of Congress) has authored a post for Library of Congress’ The Signal blog, on the “Humans in the Loop” experiment run by LC Labs. Jakeway’s post, “Stay ‘in the loop’ with LC Labs experiment combining crowdsourcing and machine learning,” covers the recent history of LC’s involvement with and experiments in “responsibly combin[ing] crowdsourcing experiences and machine learning workflows.” Past work includes the LC Labs 2019 partnership with Project AIDA researchers “on a series of demonstration projects applying machine learning to Library of Congress collections in different ways;” the LC Labs-hosted 2019 Machine Learning + Libraries Summit, the 2020 Innovators in Residence projects, and the commissioning of Ryan Cordell to “conduct a comprehensive survey of the state of field regarding machine learning and libraries,” including a final report building on “some of the Aida team’s recommendations and laid out steps for cultivating responsible ML in libraries.”

Jakeway describes “Humans in the Loop” as a response to the reports generated by these projects, in particular working on “developing ‘social and technical infrastructures’ and investing in ‘intentional explorations and investigations of particular machine learning applications.'” – “Humans in the Loop” aims to increase exposure to machine learning and crowdsourcing in the hopes of increasing public literacy around these sociotechnical issues. This exposure of the labor behind machine learning plays into the project team’s “hope is that users’ participation in the process will reveal the ways in which machine learning relies on human subjectivity and decision-making rather than objective, or neutral, classification.” The post closes with a promise of continued updates on this work.

Hannah Tarver (University of North Texas) and Steven Gentry (University of Michigan), who are members of the Digital Library Assessment Interest Group’s Metadata Assessment Working Group (DLF AIG MWG), have written an overview of metadata assessment in digital libraries, and its importance and benefits for the DLF blog. In “What is Metadata Assessment?,” they posit that,

“Metadata assessment is necessary because errors and/or inconsistencies inevitably creep into records. Collections are generally built over time, which means that many different people are involved in the lifecycle of metadata; standards or guidelines may change; and information may be moved or combined. There are a number of different quality aspects that organizations may want to evaluate within metadata values.”

The authors address five categories for metadata assessment: accuracy, completeness, conformance to expectations, consistency, and timeliness. They also address the benefits such assessments provide to users and organizations that maintain digital collections, while noting the complications of social and technical infrastructure required to approach these issues at scale with equity and quality. Tarver and Gentry’s post offers a critical resource for metadata assessment for digital humanities projects and their metadata as well.

Stephen Francoeur (CUNY Baruch College) has written a blog post, “The User Experience of Logging In: An Introduction” that categorizes “the places where problems arise” in user experience in logging into academic library resources. Francoeur details four areas of UX: “the status of the user, the user’s device, the library’s systems and resources, and a vendor’s systems or resources.”

As Francoeur notes, “Probably the biggest frustration for libraries regarding the login problem is that we have a limited ability to effect changes in the systems we buy or license.” The author intends to continue this blog post series as they work through how to improve the user experience of accessing library materials behind institutional logins. dh+lib readers who work with UX, systems, website issues, and other access problems will find this series especially useful.

Scout Calvert (Michigan State University) has published “Research Libraries, Emerging Technologies—and a Pandemic,” on EDUCAUSE Review. Calvert offers advice for libraries in the midst of the pandemic while reflecting on the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), and EDUCAUSE partnership on “how research libraries can leverage emerging technologies to meaningfully and productively support research and learning, given ongoing evolutions of digital tools and data collections.” Calvert pulls out five key findings from two reports and a series of workshops conducted by the ARL-CNI-EDUCAUSE team: “technological adoption; openness; collaboration; data and data infrastructure; and digital fluencies.”

Calvert points out that while the pandemic and the shift to distance work and education has led to much wider adoption of technological tools, allowing for more feedback on what technologies are working or not working, the desire to quickly adapt also brings up critical issues: “For example, in the rush to find a tool that helps solve a problem for online teaching, instructors may overlook important factors like data ownership, jeopardizing the ability of faculty and students to control their data.” Furthermore this rush to adopt and the new pressures on instructors has led to an increase in labor, with “shortcuts and burnout [as] two likely impacts.”

The pandemic has also emphasized the importance of openness and making scholarly outputs widely and easily available; with physical collections and many labs closed, libraries have needed to “prioritize work that supports distance learning and off-site research” more than ever before.

Finally, Calvert opines that “experts and stakeholders anticipate that research libraries, drawing on their experience and professional history of protecting patrons’ privacy, confidentiality, and intellectual freedom, can convene and guide discussions on the use of data collected in classrooms and through institutional operations.” The shift in how research is conducted and accessed during the pandemic is providing libraries with “a timely opportunity to help students learn where data comes from and how to scrutinize it, to learn how ideas, facts, and information move through digital tools and social media to be used and misused, and to learn how they can participate in furthering knowledge and expressing that knowledge in powerful new ways.”

Brian Lavoie (OCLC) recently published a post on OCLC Research’s blog, Hanging Together: “On COVID-19, research libraries, and … turtles.” Lavoie’s post summarizes recent  OCLC Research Library Partnership (RLP) Research Support Interest Group online sessions, with conversations focusing on “how completely the university research enterprise ground to a halt” and how this affected research libraries, their services, and the people who work in them.

Lavoie notes that the initial focus on moving all learning online meant that research support was not a primary concern at first, and that the shuttering of physical library spaces has naturally affected library usage. But he also notes that “librarians are also seeing increased interest in some services”:

Streaming content is growing in popularity, especially as publishers have started offering certain content for free – although there are worries that this free access is only temporary. Use of online “chat” reference services has also increased. And in some cases, access to print collections has been “virtualized”: at the University of Minnesota, for example, online access to millions of the library’s print books has been established through emergency access to digitized versions held in the HathiTrust Digital Library.

The post ends by noting that “Participants agreed that as we move forward, we need to re-examine these pandemic-era workflows, and how the library can help organize and optimize them.”

ACRLog has published a guest post from Candice Benjes-Small (William & Mary), “Remote Managing in the Time of Corona.” Benjes-Small, Head of Research Services at William & Mary Libraries, shares ten recommendations for how to manage library work and staff remotely during the pandemic.

Much of Benjes-Small’s management focuses on flexibility and understanding that remote management during the coronavirus pandemic cannot be focused on productivity: “It’s not the time to micromanage employees’ schedules or insist people be as available between 8-5. As long as the essential work is completed, I trust my reports to figure out the how and when- and to let me know if they need help.”

These recommendations are helpful, even for those who don’t directly manage staff.