Subject librarian as coauthor: A case study with recommendations

It can be challenging for subject librarians to participate in or lead Digital Humanities projects. This article presents a case study of a cataloging and digitization project that led to the creation of a Digital History website, both led by a subject librarian. Recommendations, such as leveraging your librarian skills and targeting graduate students, will be useful for other subject librarians who are looking for ways to become involved in the Digital Humanities

Does Content plus Access equal Use? Revealing la Révolution at the UMD Libraries

This poster traces two years of the University of Maryland (UMD) Libraries’ efforts to Reveal la Révolution by cataloging and digitizing their 18th-century French Pamphlet collection. Follow their steps as a cross-departmental team waded through some 12,000 pamphlets with the support of French graduate students, fine tuning workflows and communication channels along the way. While an internally-funded pilot got the project off the ground, national and international collaboration allowed them to leverage funding support from the UMD Libraries to exceed original targets for both scanning and cataloging. The result was a significant increase in digitally-available content and improved access through Worldcat and the Internet Archive. When that content and access did not turn into documented use, however, the UMD Pamphlets team pressed on, delving further into digital scholarship. Their outreach efforts culminated in a stand-alone digital history site with a crowdsourcing component that has seen some 5,500 visits since going live in September 2014 (http://colonyincrisis.lib.umd.edu). Challenges, such as a perpetual lack of dedicated staff time, and lessons learned (digital history sites require Twitter hashtags) are featured on the poster, along with a vision for a sustainable way forward

Helping Parents in a Pinch: An Academic Library Becomes More Family-Friendly

Children are present in many types of libraries—not just the public variety. The expense and difficulties of arranging childcare mean that even academic library patrons often need to bring young ones along when studying or browsing the stacks. Now, through the creation of a family study space and other amenities, the University of Maryland Libraries has made it easier for parents, caregivers, and children to visit

Ebook Use and Attitudes in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Education

A survey of more than 1,300 faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students in the humanities and social sciences at the University of Maryland generated a wealth of data on use and opinions of e-books among those users. While the initial purpose of the survey was to gather data that would aid humanities and social sciences librarians in making collection development decisions for their academic departments, the data will also be useful to all academic librarians who make decisions about e-books for their institutions.University of Maryland Libraries, Library Research Fun

Evidence for Development and Enhancement of a Popular Reading Collection in an Academic Library

Describes the development of a collection of popular books and audiobooks at the University of Maryland Libraries

Kids in the Library: Enacting Joy in the Academic Workplace Through the Creation of a Family Study Space

While children’s services are traditionally associated with public libraries, the increase in students with dependent children means that academic libraries are increasingly being called to provide family-friendly spaces. Using the University of Maryland Libraries as a case study, the authors detail the process of developing, implementing, and overseeing family-friendly services, including a family study room and activity kits for children. They argue there is value in welcoming families into the academy and projects, such as a family study room, worthy not only for the contributions they make to the community but also for the opportunity to enact joy in our daily practice as academic librarians

E-Book Perceptions and Use in STEM and Non-STEM Disciplines: A Comparative Follow-Up Study

This project was funded by the University of Maryland Libraries' Library Research Fund,This article describes the results of a survey that gathered data on perceptions and use of e-books from undergraduate students, graduate students, faculty, and staff. The investigators analyzed the results based on user affiliate status and subject discipline and compared the results with the findings of a similar, smaller-scale study conducted in 2012. The study concludes with a discussion of the major findings and their implications for academic libraries and publishers, as well as areas for further inquiry.Copyright © 2016 The Johns Hopkins University Press. This article first appeared in PORTAL: LIBRARIES AND THE ACADEMY, Volume 16, Issue 1, January, 2016, pages 131-163

Final Report,Task Force on McKeldin Library Research Commons, University of Maryland Libraries

Higher education institutions are undergoing a fundamental transformation in their role in our society, economic structure, and value system. The University of Maryland (UMD) Libraries find themselves in the midst of this constantly changing environment where new technologies, new pedagogies, new publishing models, and new environments evolve every day. Librarians are being challenged to undertake new roles in order to support the research activities of their user population and to foster research and teaching initiatives across the university. With these trends in mind, the Research Commons Task Force was charged to research and plan for implementing new services and creating new research spaces. To accomplish this task, the Research Commons Task Force consulted the literature and conducted an extensive environmental scan by interviewing those involved in the creation of research commons at other universities, meeting with internal partners, and surveying graduate students and faculty at the University of Maryland. The resulted Final Report is a comprehensive document, which addresses UMD research needs, assessment, staffing, spaces, and technology concerns. It intends to serve as a guide for developing and implementing this model at the UMD Libraries and provides a robust yet flexible framework for the future

Intervening in French: A Colony in Crisis, the Digital Humanities, and the French Classroom

This essay explore​s​ the use of *A Colony in Crisis: The Saint-Domingue Grain Crisis of 1789* in the French literature classroom and how it helps address gaps in digital humanities and French language pedagogy while interrogating the colonial positionality of the French Revolution’s digital archive. In 2015, the Newberry Library received a Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) to digitize 30,000 French language pamphlets, a portion of which pertains to the period before, during, and after the French Revolution. As the digital archive of the French Revolution rapidly grows, the need to draw attention to the broader context of revolution in the French Empire–particularly in the Caribbean–has become even more urgent. ​One of the most effective ways of addressing the marginalization of the Caribbean in colonial archives is through pedagogical interventions and course design. While digital humanities pedagogy has become somewhat normalized in the anglophone literature classroom, the French language classroom has been slow to adapt to the use of digital tools and pedagogy beyond the introductory language course

Faculty and Student Use and Opinions of E-Books at University of Maryland

Presentation to library staff, August 14, 2012.Like most university libraries, the University of Maryland Libraries purchase e-books from a variety of vendors and in a variety of formats, and statistics show that our e-books are heavily used by our patrons. Also like most university libraries, we face space constraints and other factors that increasingly pressure us to purchase a significant portion of our collection in e-book form, rather than in print. Yet anecdotal evidence suggests that many patrons still prefer print. Many of our colleagues have experienced interactions similar to those reported by Cynthia Gregory (2008), wherein a student shown a catalog record for an e-book responds, “But I want a real book.” Beyond such amusing anecdotes, however, it was clear that there was a serious gap in what we knew about our users’ preferences for print or electronic books. Will scholars in the Humanities and Social Sciences, for example, support a collection shift to e-books, which may not be compatible with research methods practiced and taught in these disciplines? The purpose of this study, then, was to gather data on use of and attitudes about e-books among faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students in the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Maryland (UMD). To keep the quantity of data manageable while providing a thorough cross-section of the Humanities and Social Sciences departments on campus, we limited the survey to participants from three colleges: Arts and Humanities, Behavioral and Social Sciences, and Education. Specifically, the purpose of this study was to learn about user preferences for accessing certain kinds of written materials (e.g., scholarly monographs, edited collections, reference works, etc.), difficulties encountered when identifying, accessing, and/or using e-books, and the suitability of e-books to research methods in disciplines within the Humanities and Social Sciences. Research questions included: 1. Do (or how often do) Humanities and Social Sciences faculty and students use e-books for research purposes? Do (or how often do) they use e-books for recreational reading? 2. How do Humanities and Social Sciences faculty and students identify, access, and use e-books for their research and/or recreational reading? Which e-book sources and/or collections do they use most frequently? 3. For what materials in their discipline do Humanities and Social Sciences faculty and students prefer the Libraries to buy e-books? For what materials do they prefer us to buy print books? 4. How do use and attitudes compare among UM respondents of different statuses (faculty, graduate student, or undergraduate student) and colleges? Conducted in spring 2012, the survey netted 1,343 valid responses, an overall response rate of 8.6% (and, for faculty, a response rate as high as 24.8%). This presentation highlights some of the most interesting data and results from the survey.Library Faculty Research Fun