Chelcie Juliet Rowell, Digital Initiatives Librarian at Wake Forest University, interviews Ashley Sanders, the Digital Scholarship Librarian for the Claremont Colleges. After meeting at the 2015 Digital Library Federation Forum in Vancouver, BC, Ashley and Chelcie are glad to have identified each other as fellow learners in a digital humanities, libraries, and liberal arts community of practice. More conversations and collaborations to come!

Chelcie: What is your digital humanities and librarianship origin story?

Ashley: My academic background is actually a little unusual. I have a bachelor’s degree in both math and history secondary education and a Ph.D. in history. After completing my undergraduate degree, I taught high school history for one semester and high school math for two years before entering the Ph.D. program at Michigan State University. During my time at MSU, my interest in DH developed organically through conversations with other grad students. The more I understood about it, the more I realized that it provided a way to link my background in math, logic, and some basic programming with my work in history. As I got closer to completing my degree, I realized how many interesting paths were available because of the digital skills I developed during grad school. One of the most appealing options was working in an academic library because of my service-orientation, desire to continue teaching, and experience with new modes of scholarship. Moreover, the library offered the opportunity to work in a more human-centric academic environment. Much of my work depends on building strong relationships and collaborative efforts with colleagues, both in and outside the library.

Chelcie: How does your discipline (history) shape your view of your role as a librarian?

Ashley: There is a natural symbiosis between historians, librarians, and archivists. For example, my research on the history of Native communities in the United States and Algerians’ parallel experience of colonization made me very conscious of whose stories are told, by whom, and for whom, issues that are central to the critical practice of librarianship. Libraries and archives do not build themselves; the decisions that librarians and archivists make about what items to collect, as well as how to describe and organize them, have important consequences for discoverability and the ease with which scholars can identify connections among sources. The composition of collections and the accessibility of materials shape what and how questions are asked and answered.  Furthermore, my experience as a historian has given me strong research skills with which to learn a new field — librarianship — and influences my approach to teaching, commitment to preserving the historical record, and advocacy for open access whenever possible. Finally, having survived a Ph.D. program, as well as having my own research and publication agenda, provides common ground on which to build relationships with faculty and administrators from the various Claremont Colleges.

Chelcie: What do you most want to accomplish in your work? Not necessarily the responsibilities in your position description, but the goals you hold personally?

Ashley: First and foremost, I want to help my colleagues create a warm, welcoming, and safe environment for our entire seven-college community, and I want to begin with my office. I want my office to be a place where faculty, students, and other librarians feel comfortable sharing the challenges they face in their research and digital projects and can walk out, empowered with a clear sense of direction.

I also want my information literacy and digital humanities instruction sessions and courses to be impactful, timely, and relevant for undergraduates, grad students, faculty, and librarians. As part of my work building a DH community of practice, I want to help my colleagues in the library deepen their expertise in the areas of digital humanities and broader digital scholarship issues, such as open access, intellectual property rights, as well as digital literacy, citizenship, and security.

Somehow, in the midst of these broader goals, I want to continue my own historical research and publish in both history and library science to contribute what I’ve learned to these scholarly conversations.

Chelcie: Do you have anyone who deeply influenced who you are and what you’re committed to in your work? Tell me about them.

Ashley: My work in an inner city high school in Michigan and my historical research have both deeply influenced who I am as a person and the focus of my work. At the high school I taught history and math with a strong commitment to social justice and advocacy. The challenges that faced the diverse, talented students with whom I had the privilege to work strengthened that commitment. That experience also instilled a new commitment to opening access to scholarship and knowledge to K–12 teachers, students, and under-served communities in the United States. My research on the Middle East and North Africa extended the scope of my desire to open access for students and scholars around the world.

Chelcie: Tell me about a specific project — something you worked on in the past or something you’re working on right now that excites you or makes you proud.

Ashley: I am really excited about the community of practice that is developing around DH at the Claremont Colleges — in part because it is a diverse group that includes faculty from the various campuses, graduate students, staff, and librarians. We’re working together to tackle big questions, such as how best to preserve, maintain and provide access to the digital scholarly projects that faculty and students build, as well as how to foster digitally infused courses and critical digital pedagogy.

The library is also in the midst of revamping its physical spaces to meet the needs of this and future generations of students and scholars. As project manager of one of these initiatives, I am guiding our library and campus to re-imagine our GIS lab as a more inclusive, accessible, and technology-rich space. It will still include GIS software and expertise but will also become a multi-media production site as well as a data analysis and visualization space. We’re calling it our “Digital Tool Shed,” and it will serve as an exploratory space where members of the Claremont Colleges community can come to learn new technology. The hope is that it will serve as an incubator for new and innovative digital scholarship. One of the best parts of this process has been incorporating our students into the design phase. We have been working closely with the Rick and Susan Sontag Center for Collaborative Creativity (the Hive), which launched its first design thinking pop-up course. The participating students interviewed potential users of the Digital Tool Shed, listened carefully to their concerns and wishes for this space and then developed, prototyped, and tested creative solutions. Our student advisory board, BOSS, has also been involved and given helpful feedback. Now it’s time to put all of those ideas together and remodel and equip our space!

Chelcie: What’s the next area of knowledge that you want to add to your repertoire as you continue to settle into your new role as Digital Scholarship Librarian at the Claremont Colleges Library? Or more broadly, what’s next for you? What are you looking forward to?

Ashley: This question might take all day to answer! I’m an intensely curious person — about everything. So, I am returning to my roots in mathematics, brushing up on and then extending my knowledge of graph theory to understand how humanities scholars can, do, and might apply the methodology of network analysis in their own research. I, too, have some networks I am anxious to analyze and understand in new and different ways.

I am also in the middle of teaching a DH course for librarians at the Claremont Colleges Library, which will lay the groundwork for a series of professional development workshops I’m launching this next semester on digital scholarship issues, such as digital identity and security, open access, and IP. This coming summer, our librarians will also have the opportunity to participate in a DH maker week focused on our Special Collections and data visualization of our collections, acquisitions, usage, web page analytics, and other assessment metrics for both internal and external audiences.

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Laurie Allen, Coordinator for Digital Scholarship and Services at Haverford College, was the very first person to be interviewed for a Scene Report. dh+lib Editor Sarah Potvin, the Digital Scholarship Librarian at Texas A&M University, conducted the interview.

Preface from Laurie: After having finished answering these questions, I read Bethany Nowviskie’s awesome “On Capacity and Care” and it has become clear to me that I should re-write everything here to reflect her insights, which serve to challenge and deepen my ways of thinking as always. But if my standard for letting my writing live on the internet is that it must match Bethany’s, I’ll continue to not write things. So, if you haven’t already, you should go read that. If I’d read it before writing this, I’d have answered these questions differently, and I look forward to letting that essay seep into my ways of thinking over time, and seeing how it changes the ways I see things.

Sarah: Which came first for you: DH or libraries/archives?

Laurie: Libraries. I started library school in 2000, a year after finishing college. At that point, becoming a librarian felt very much like a calling. I was a philosophy major in college and I worked as a student worker in the library as an undergrad but never thought of becoming a librarian until my sister brought it up that winter after I graduated from college. Then it all fell into place. Since then, there have been lots of narratives about why librarianship was right for me. The cynical narrative: “I wanted to be around academically minded people, but I didn’t want to have my own research agenda, or devote myself to one thing forever, and I didn’t want to have to move somewhere for a job.” The philosophical narrative: “I had just written my senior thesis exploring how the ways that we organize the world around us shapes everything. I was convinced that, basically, by putting things in categories, we bring them into existence as a community, and I saw libraries as the seemingly benign but secretly powerful way that our culture expresses its organizing principles. I wanted to be part of changing everything, so changing how we organize what we know seemed like the key; I thought I’d be a cataloger.” (That narrative was the one I used in my essay to apply to library school.) There was the personal: “My sister had just read The Goldbug Variations and there was a librarian character and she got to learn cool stuff all the time in Brooklyn and that seemed awesome to me.” And there was the fact that almost everything I wanted for the holidays that year was a reference book or a historic city map. Anyway, libraries are and always have been my home. DH came later. It appeals to me for a lot of the same reasons and for some new ones that have developed as I’ve gotten older. DH is also my home now. Sometimes it feels like my two homes are in tension but mostly it’s a tension I enjoy.

Sarah: What are some of the special issues that liberal arts colleges encounter around DH and libraries? How does this shape your collaborations?

Laurie: Working in DH in a liberal arts college library has been, for me, tremendously fun. Both DH and liberal arts colleges foster individual collaborations. They are both kind of personal in a way that I really enjoy. In my version of DH, it is also very much a liberal art, drawing on different ways of knowing and requiring depth, breadth, and explicitly ethical ways of learning. And those are also qualities that liberal arts colleges pride themselves on fostering, so we get to be involved in great projects with great students when we work at the intersection. Also, DH lends itself to creativity and small schools allow a kind of creativity that is harder to imagine when you have to worry about “what if 10,000 people want to do this?” I’ve said this before and I’m not sure everyone agrees but it seems to me that the whole liberal arts college enterprise is antithetical to the notion of scalability, so it allows for kinds of risk and creativity that work well with DH projects where, at least for me, the goal is to find the mode of inquiry and expression that connect most closely to the question you’re developing. Of course the small scale can also be limiting. There just aren’t as many resources or people at a liberal arts college and so the scope of what we can do might be smaller than at a bigger place.

Sarah: Tell us about an author or publication/project that you recommend and return to.

Laurie: Two answers come to mind. First, everything written by Miriam Posner or Bethany Nowviskie. Truly, in my career, their writing and thinking has been absolutely vital to keeping me inspired and excited about what I do, and what it can be part of.
Second, “The Ecstasy of Influence,” by Jonathan Letham, an article in Harpers in 2007. I have since become somewhat disenchanted with him as an author but that way of thinking about art, culture, and creativity continues to really resonate with me.

Sarah: How has DH affected your work in libraries?

Laurie: I find DH really empowering. As I mentioned, there’s a part of me that became a librarian because I liked the idea of being a helper in the world of ideas — I wanted to get to learn things and be useful, but I didn’t want my main intellectual work to be the production of my own scholarship. But as I’ve gotten older, I suppose I’ve become more bold, and I like how DH expects me to bring myself to the work I do; to bring my own agenda and my own values and perspective — to be a collaborator in addition to being service provider. As I said, it feels like a natural part of getting older. (I’m picturing a terrible t-shirt that says “When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple and I’ll take credit for my ideas.”) Certainly there are librarians who don’t do DH who have always seen themselves as full collaborators in the scholarly work on their campus. But that didn’t really resonate for me personally, and I don’t think it’s the expectation at our institutions, for the most part. In the model where a lone scholar produces knowledge through grueling labor with the help and support of others, I relate much more to the helpers than to the scholar. But in DH, where collaboration is really at the center of projects, I’m finding that I’m enjoying feeling some ownership over our projects and contributing in ways that feel really satisfying (and new) to me.

Sarah: What’s one thing you’re working on now that you’re excited about?

Laurie: There are really so many. Monument Lab is a public art and civic engagement project in Philadelphia that asks people in Philly to reflect on our civic memory. My part of the project mostly engages me in thinking about how official and unofficial uses of data make and obscure meaning within communities. The project has been really fully co-created with scholars, artists, and undergraduates. And a huge piece of the project has been to ask this open-ended question– “what is an appropriate monument for the current city of Philadelphia”– to residents of Philly, and to collect and work to understand and value the answers we get. I love that project. It’s also made me really step up my javascript skills, which is also fun. But really it’s one of a few projects I’m really passionate about at the moment. This fall is busy.

Sarah: Busy: I hear you on that. A good sort of busy. Could we find time, though, to make that t-shirt you pitched in your second-to-last answer a living reality?

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This inaugural Scene Report finds the chairs of the 2015 Digital Library Federation Forum Liberal Arts Colleges preconference in conversation, in the final weeks leading up to the event. Here, Kelcy Shepherd, Head of Digital Programs at Amherst College is interviewed by Laurie Allen, Coordinator for Digital Scholarship and Services at Haverford College.

Laurie: What do you think your role is as a librarian/archivist who does DH?

Kelcy: Connector, problem solver, motivator, project manager, teacher, idea generator.

Laurie: Is there advice you give to people who are considering becoming a librarian/archivist? What is it?

Kelcy: I love to talk to people who are interested in the field. I’m a huge cheerleader for the profession – I probably give potential librarians/archivists way more information than they’re looking for! In terms of advice, it’s usually: find good mentors; look at job descriptions to make sure you’re getting the knowledge and/or experience you’ll need when you’re looking for positions; and do it, because librarians and archivists are great people to work with, and we generally love what we do. The first two are actually relevant at any career stage. I’ve been lucky to have had smart, supportive mentors throughout my career, and I try to pass that on.

Laurie: You’ve worked in Liberal Arts Colleges and big ARL environments. Is there anything you’ve learned at Amherst that you think you might not have learned at ARLs?

Kelcy: I feel like this question should have some grand, far-reaching answer, but for me it’s really been more personal. I’ve learned how important it is for me to feel like the work I do has a direct impact – even if it’s a small one – on making the world better. And, I’ve realized that can happen through individual connections. I’ve never been in the public services side of things, but in my position at Amherst I’ve had the opportunity to create programs like our Digital Summer Scholarship Internship, and to collaborate with amazing librarian colleagues and faculty to integrate digital humanities into the classroom. In the best cases, these kinds of experiential, collaborative projects can be transformative for students, and it’s rewarding to be a part of that.

Laurie: What would your dream academic conference be about?

Kelcy: Is it cheating to sidestep what it would be about, and instead talk about how it would work? I would love a conference that brought together people from a broad range of disciplines to consider a single topic from a variety of perspectives. It would be one track, so everyone was getting the same information, and include a lot of time for interaction, questioning, and discussion. It would be both inspirational and down to earth. Oh, and it would be held in Iceland.

In my last semester of college, I took a graduate seminar on the Plains. We studied the region through multiple lenses: geology, natural history, anthropology, history, political science, literature, and art. It’s my favorite class I’ve ever taken, and I would love to attend a conference that followed the same approach. So much of what I do, even outside of my job, is related to librarianship. I’m trying to work on that.

If you held me to picking a topic, I’d say librarianship as social justice. That would be amazing, too.

Laurie: What’s one thing you’re working on now that you’re excited about?

Kelcy: We just got an IMLS planning grant for a project called the Digital Atlas of Native American Intellectual Traditions. We’ll be bringing together Native Studies scholars, Native librarians, tribal historians, and a variety of other experts to discuss cultural and technological issues around improving culturally appropriate access to digital collections of Native-authored materials. We’ve got great partners and advisors in the Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries, and Museums, the Mukurtu project, and the Digital Public Library of America. Our biggest objective in this is to create a space for ongoing conversation and collaboration between Native and non-Native collecting institutions and build trust across communities.

Laurie: You did cheat on that perfect conference answer. But now we might need to talk about co-chairing a seminar-style meeting about librarianship as social justice.

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