Collaboration Success in the Dataverse Libraries as Digital Humanities Research Partners

At Deakin, the Humanities Networked Infrastructure project (HuNI), has paved new ground for facilitating the effective use and re-use of humanities research data. HuNI is one of the first large-scale eResearch infrastructure projects for the humanities in Australia and the first national, cross-disciplinary Virtual Laboratory (VL) worldwide. HuNI provides new information infrastructure services for both humanities researchers and members of the public. Its development has been funded by the National eResearch Collaboration Tools and Resources project (NeCTAR) and undertaken by a consortium of thirteen institutions led by Deakin University. A Deakin University Library team with skills in data description, curation, retrieval and preservation is exploring with digital humanities researchers and developers effective means to support and maintain the HuNI project. HuNI ingests and aggregates data from a total of 31 different Australian cultural datasets which cover a wide range of disciplines in the humanities and creative arts. The HuNI VL also provides a number of online research capabilities for humanities researchers to discover and work with the large-scale aggregation of data. The HuNI VL enables researchers to create, save and publish selections of data; to analyse and manipulate the data; share findings and to export the data for reuse in external environments. In a major innovation, HuNI also enables researchers to assert relationships between entities in the form of ‘socially linked’ data. This capability contributes to the building of a ‘vernacular’ network of associations between HuNI records that embody diverse perspectives on knowledge and ramify avenues for research discovery beyond keyword and phrase searches. This paper reports on key milestones in this project, the future role of Libraries as digital humanities research partners and the challenges and sustainability issues that face national digital humanities research projects that are developed in strategic library settings

The Vermont Digital Newspaper Project and the National Digital Newspaper Program: Cooperative Efforts in Long-Term Digital Newspaper Access and Preservation

The Vermont Digital Newspaper Project (VTDNP) is a state partner in the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP). Developed by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Library of Congress (LC), the NDNP is a long-term, national effort to build a freely accessible, searchable Internet database of historical US newspapers. NEH provides funding to state projects to select and digitize historic newspapers published between 1836 and 1922. LC provides the technical support and framework for preservation digitization. Digitized newspapers are archived by LC and made freely available through the website Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Vermont joined the NDNP in July 2010, when the University of Vermont Libraries were awarded NEH funding to embark collaboratively with state partners—including the Vermont Department of Libraries, the Ilsley Public Library of Middlebury, and the Vermont Historical Society—on the Vermont Digital Newspaper Project. Institutional partnerships and the engagement of committed individuals serve as a foundation to the VTDNP and provide an avenue to expand statewide infrastructures to accommodate large-scale microfilm-to-digital conversion and preservation efforts. Through collaboration and outreach, project partners select and digitize historical newspapers from microfilm and promote Chronicling America, a tool for discovery of these primary historical resources

Becoming the Gothic Archive: From Digital Collection to Digital Humanities

The Gothic Archive is the flagship digital humanities project for the Marquette University library. The project was birthed from a simple digital collection, and through the partnership of faculty and librarians, was transformed into something more. The core tenets of digital collection creation were adhered to in order to create a solid foundation upon which to build the Archive. The expertise of both groups and communication were key in the evolution of the collection, and in discovering and highlighting the relationships between the objects. This case study reviews the steps Marquette took in creating the collection and taking it to the level of digital humanities project

Student Labour and Training in Digital Humanities

This article critiques the rhetoric of openness, accessibility and collaboration that features largely in digital humanities literature by examining the status of student labour, training, and funding within the discipline. The authors argue that the use of such rhetoric masks the hierarches that structure academic spaces, and that a shift to the digital does not eliminate these structural inequalities. Drawing on two surveys that assess student participation in DH projects (one for students, and one for faculty researchers), the article outlines the challenges currently faced by students working in the field, and suggests a set of best practices that might bridge the disparity between rhetoric and reality

Collaborative yet independent: Information practices in the physical sciences

In many ways, the physical sciences are at the forefront of using digital tools and methods to work with information and data. However, the fields and disciplines that make up the physical sciences are by no means uniform, and physical scientists find, use, and disseminate information in a variety of ways. This report examines information practices in the physical sciences across seven cases, and demonstrates the richly varied ways in which physical scientists work, collaborate, and share information and data. This report details seven case studies in the physical sciences. For each case, qualitative interviews and focus groups were used to understand the domain. Quantitative data gathered from a survey of participants highlights different information strategies employed across the cases, and identifies important software used for research. Finally, conclusions from across the cases are drawn, and recommendations are made. This report is the third in a series commissioned by the Research Information Network (RIN), each looking at information practices in a specific domain (life sciences, humanities, and physical sciences). The aim is to understand how researchers within a range of disciplines find and use information, and in particular how that has changed with the introduction of new technologies

Iterative Evolution of the Liaison Librarian Role: A Brief Case Study

Recognizing a need to evolve subject liaison responsibilities and related skill sets with an emphasis on digital research and pedagogy, The University of Texas Libraries (UTL) at the University of Texas at Austin has reorganized its Academic Engagement division and related approach to liaison work twice in the past two years.UT Librarie

Creating Digital Art History: Library, Student, and Faculty Collaboration

Over the last two decades, teaching, learning, and research in higher education have developed a growing digital presence. Digital development in the humanities has been slow relative to most other areas in academia, and with some exceptions, art and art history have enjoyed slow digital growth within the humanities. Within this environment, the article here presents one collaborative model for digital art history, rare in its exclusive focus on undergraduate “junior scholars”. Undergraduate senior-level art history and studio art students at Providence College collaborate annually with art history and studio art faculty to publish their senior theses in print format as the Art Journal. In the last few years, students, faculty, and digital library staff have enhanced this collaboration to include the publishing from process to product of the Art Journal as a complementary digital Art Journal. They collaborate in creating digital art history and digital studio art in order to bring exponentially greater meaning, significance and visibility to the students’ senior culminating works through real-world digital publishing, including quality control, copyright issues, and ideas related to persistent access and ongoing global visibility for the scholarly and creative works, and for the student scholars. These students function as real-world collaborative scholarly partners in publishing their culminating academic and artistic work globally, and persistently accessible in Providence College’s digital repositories. This case study evidences engagement in meaningful digital knowledge creation focused on the intellectual and creative output of student-scholars and student-artists (art historians and studio artists) as a model for other student-faculty-digital library professional collaborations. Note: Full text document is a pre-print version of article due to publisher rights. Publisher\u27s version available at the following citation: Bailey, D. Russell. Creating Digital Art History: Library, Student and Faculty Collaboration . The International Journal of New Media, Technology, and the Arts. Volume 10. Issue 2. 2015. pp. 1-10. Ninth International Conference on the Arts in Society website: http://artsinsociety.com/the-conference-201

Infrastructures for digital research: new opportunities and challenges

No abstract available