Category: Post

 

The DLF Community Spotlight recently highlighted ScholarSphere, Penn State’s institutional repository. Authors Mike Giarlo and Patricia Hswe discuss how ScholarSphere differs from other IRs: “Having refrained from jumping on the IR bandwagon in the early 2000s, Penn State was an outlier among R1 university peers. The deliberation, however, allowed us to leverage lessons learned in hindsight from first-generation IRs, especially the need to draw involvement early from users.”

While IRs might not generally fall under the digital humanities umbrella, the post affirms the importance of “community centered development,” as Penn State contributes to the Hydra project and develops Sufia, a Rails engine for facilitating self-deposit institutional. There may be lessons for DHers in terms of project management, partnering with library IT, and developing and customizing software. Additionally, Giarlo and Hswe note that “Putting community — whether at the local, organizational, or national level — ahead of other concerns has turned into a fundamental strategy for sustaining digital preservation and stewardship services at Penn State.”

 

Mark Sample has written a post challenging the recent New York Times article tracing the decline in humanities majors at American universities using data collected by Ben Schmidt of Northeastern University in this interactive graph. While Schmidt’s data is in the aggregate, one can break down the data more granularly to better understand trends in undergraduate majors that counters the narrative of the humanities in crisis. Sample concludes that, “Clearly we should be doing more to counter the perception that the humanities—and by extension, the liberal arts—are in crisis mode. My own experience in the classroom doesn’t support this notion, and neither does the data.”

Kenneth Crews (Director, Copyright Advisory Office at Columbia University) has shared his notes from the October 30th appellate hearing of the Authors Guild v. HathiTrust case.

As Crews notes in an earlier post on the original ruling, the case has important implications for fair use in libraries:

[T]he judge ruled on motions for summary judgment, finding that the retention and use of millions of digital books for purposes of preservation, text search, and accessibility for the visually impaired were within the limits of fair use.  The ruling is enormously important for the continued vitality of HathiTrust, but Judge Baer’s written opinion offers an analysis of fair use that will be helpful in the evaluation of many future projects, especially in the context of libraries, education, and research.

The case also has implications for digital humanities scholars, so much so that in June, 2012, a “Brief of Digital Humanities and Law Scholars as Amici Curiae in Authors Guild v. Hathitrust” was filed in support of “non-consumptive” uses of digitized texts.

Thomas Padilla (Graduate Research Assistant, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) has written a brief post on using Topic Modeling Tool to aid with archival arrangement and description. Padilla reviews a test application of the popular text analysis technique to the Carl Woese Papers, finding that:

The University Archives’ application of topic modeling to the electronic files of Carl Woese demonstrates promise as an approach that shortens the time between acquisition and access while providing an alternative imposition of order on and meaning to a collection for scholars to navigate.

 

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) formally launched last week during DPLAfest. Ryan Cordell (Northeastern University) wrote a recap of the event, which  included announcements of a $1 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for public libraries training; the addition of three more service hubs in New York, Texas, and North Carolina; and the DPLA Bookshelf for browsing DPLA’s collection of over one million books (DPLA currently has over 5 million total items in its collection). Open notes from the DPLAfest sessions are available, and the recorded video streams will be available later in the week.

David Golumbia draws attention to Daniel Allington’s post, “On open access, and why it’s not the answer.” Allington raises critical issues about the open access movement and whether it meets its objectives, writing:

[W]hat did its advocates (me, for example) think it was going to facilitate? And now that it’s become mainstream, does it look as if it’s going to facilitate that thing we had in mind, or something else entirely?…The more I look back, the more I realise that open access had been proposed as the solution to a range of problems some of which had very little to do with one another. The more I look forward, the more I realise that among those problems were some that might actually be exacerbated by the form of open access that has become official policy in the UK-and others that were never likely to be addressed by any form of open access (including the one in which I believed).

Golumbia closes his post with the comment he added to Allington’s blog outlining some points about the limits of the open access movement including publicity, discipline specificity, and role of libraries.

ALA Tech Source blog debuted the first in a series of posts excerpted from the forthcoming LITA Guide, The Comparative Guide to WordPress in Libraries. “Done in WordPress: Scholarly Publishing @ MIT Libraries” describes how MIT Libraries leverages WordPress as “an information hub on open access Scholarly Publishing @ MIT Libraries.” The post outlines the process behind MIT’s decision to use WordPress, a few words about “building, evaluation, and special features” of WordPress within their site as well as the plugins they use.

The Comparative Guide to WordPress in Libraries will be published in December.

Laurie N. Taylor (Digital Humanities Librarian, University of Florida) calls attention to recent efforts by the Ohio State University Libraries to examine their digital exhibits pilot project (full report available here [docx]). Taylor notes:

The report is well worth reading because it details the process, including goals, findings from the process, and next steps; this includes a technical review with review of the functional requirements (system design) that then extends into non-functional requirements (system architecture: scale, interoperability, extensibility, supportability etc.) during the testing of the pilot project.

 

In a new post, Jessamyn West, librarian and author of Without a Net: Librarians Bridging the Digital Divide, responds to a recent article, published by the New America Foundation, about incorporating discussions of privacy into digital literacy training. West’s post highlights some of the more salient points of the article, “Joining the Surveillance Society? New Internet Users in an Age of Tracking,” and notes, “While I don’t agree with every aspect of the article, the thesis is strong and worth exploring. Only some of the classes mentioned are library classes.”

As the digital humanities explores the role of digital literacy in its work (see, for example, Cathy Davidson’s  “How Digital Humanists Can Lead Us To National Digital Literacy” and Elijah Meeks’ “Digital Literacy and Digital Citizenship“), how much attention does privacy education receive in these efforts?

 

Inna Kouper has shared her summary from the second bi-annual Research Data Alliance (RDA) Plenary that took place in September in Washington, D.C. (a meeting we’ve featured previously on dh+lib). In reviewing the keynotes, she observes:

This new evidential culture requires better documentation and provenance and more effective techniques of data collection, sharing and re-use. And how do we make a shift toward the new culture? Unfortunately, it is still not clear. As Carole Palmer said, “the social part is hard.” Perhaps, this is a social scientist job – making connections between infrastructure teams and users, identifying and smoothing tensions, “championing” for certain decisions.

The Third RDA Plenary will meet on March 26-28, 2014, in Dublin, Ireland.