Reading Critically from the Archives: James Merrill Linn’s Diary as a Gateway to the Past

Archival research and reading from the archives have long been embraced as a scholarly research practice in humanities disciplines. While scholars may spend weeks or months poring over hidden treasures found in archives, undergraduate students are often not exposed to these materials in a hands-on way. However, college and university libraries often have archival collections tucked away that can facilitate learning when used in thoughtfully crafted assignments. In this chapter, we discuss how we used Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) and archival materials to provide students with an opportunity to engage in a close and critical reading of excerpts from the Civil War era diary of James Merrill Linn

You Built It, but Can You Talk About It?

Gettysburg College and Bucknell University have adopted library-led summer research fellowships for undergraduates that focus on teaching research skills with digital methods. In the summer of 2017, Gettysburg and Bucknell\u27s student cohorts met to learn how to create elevator speeches for their research topics; R.C. Miessler (Gettysburg), and Carrie Pirmann and Courtney Paddick (Bucknell), talk about the structure and goals of their summer programs, with a focus on their combined session and the importance of helping students learn how to talk about their research

From the Ground Up: Building a Student-Centered Digital Scholarship Program

In Summer 2017, Bucknell’s Digital Scholarship Student Research Fellows (DSSRF) program welcomed its inaugural cohort. DSSRF is a librarian-led program which introduces students to digital scholarship tools and methodologies, and equips them with the skills necessary to undertake an independent, digitally-based research project. In this presentation, co-facilitators Courtney Paddick and Carrie Pirmann will discuss how the idea of DSSRF was brought to fruition, lessons learned from the first year of the program, and the importance of collaboration (both on campus and interinstitutional) in facilitating a meaningful learning experience for students. Rennie Heza \u2718, Justin Guzman ‘19, and Minglu Xu ‘20, members of the first DSSRF cohort, will talk about their experiences in the program and what drew them to digital scholarship

Bridging Communities of Practice: Cross-Institutional Collaboration for Undergraduate Digital Scholars

At Bucknell University and Gettysburg College, an increasing focus on supporting creative undergraduate research as intensive, high-impact experiences has resulted in both institutions implementing library-led digital scholarship fellowships for their students. Gettysburg’s Digital Scholarship Summer Fellowship began in 2016, and Bucknell’s Digital Scholarship Summer Research Fellowship in 2017. While academic libraries have emerged as leaders on college campuses for digital humanities (DH) services, the programs at Gettysburg and Bucknell are distinctive in their structured curricula, a focus on independent student research, and the development of a local community of practice. In this chapter, we explore the development of cross-institutional communities of practice grounded in the digital humanities, and the ways in which we brought students in our two programs together

Collaborating on Machine Reading: Training Algorithms to Read Complex Collections

Interdisciplinary collaboration between two faculty members in the humanities and computer science, a research librarian, and an undergraduate student has led to remarkable results in an ongoing international DH research project that has at its core 18th century manuscripts. The corpus stems from a vast collection of archival materials held by the Moravian Church in the UK, Germany, and the US. The number of pages to be transcribed, differences in handwriting styles, paper quality, and original language pose enormous problems for the feasibility of human transcription. This presentation will review the hypothesis, process, and findings of a summer research project that builds upon the Transkribus (Transkribus.eu) platform and seeks to refine the process for creating handwriting training recognition (HTR) models to further improve accuracy. An undergraduate student working with a faculty member in computer science developed a deep learning model to help overcome challenges of accuracy in computer transcription

Bridging Communities of Practice: Cross-Institutional Collaboration for Undergraduate Digital Scholars

At Bucknell University and Gettysburg College, an increasing focus on supporting creative undergraduate research as intensive, high-impact experiences has resulted in both institutions implementing library-led digital scholarship fellowships for their students. Gettysburg’s Digital Scholarship Summer Fellowship began in 2016, and Bucknell’s Digital Scholarship Summer Research Fellowship in 2017.1 While academic libraries have emerged as leaders on college campuses for digital humanities (DH) services, the programs at Gettysburg and Bucknell are distinctive in their structured curricula, a focus on independent student research, and the development of a local community of practice. Each program situates undergraduate research in the field of digital humanities, providing methodological and technological support as students explore their own topics of humanistic inquiry and develop public-facing digital projects during the summer. [excerpt

Enhancing Subject Access to Materials in Library OPACs: Are Folksonomies the Answer?

This research will examine a given set of books and compare their LibraryThing folksonomic tags with their assigned Library of Congress Subject Headings. In particular, I am looking for commonalities and differences in the ways in which these subject languages describe the materials to which they are applied. Can folksonomies be used to enhance subject access to materials in library catalogs? What does user tagging tell us about the way that people think about the subjects of a book? In an information environment where students are so attuned to keyword and Google-style searching, does the application of folksonomic tags increase the findability of library materials

Tags in the Catalogue: Insights From a Usability Study of LibraryThing for Libraries

Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), the standard subject language used in library catalogues, are often criticized for their lack of currency, biased language, and atypical syndetic structure. Conversely, folksonomies (or tags), which rely on the natural language of their users, offer a flexibility often lacking in controlled vocabularies and may offer a means of augmenting more rigid controlled vocabularies such as LCSH. Content analysis studies have demonstrated the potential for folksonomies to be used as a means of enhancing subject access to materials, and libraries are beginning to integrate tagging systems into their catalogues. This study examines the utility of tags as a means of enhancing subject access to materials in library online public access catalogues (OPACs) through usability testing with the LibraryThing for Libraries catalogue enhancements. Findings indicate that while they cannot replace LCSH, tags do show promise for aiding information seeking in OPACs. In the context of information systems design, the study revealed that while folksonomies have the potential to enhance subject access to materials, that potential is severely limited by the current inability of catalogue interfaces to support tag-based searches alongside standard catalogue searches.published or submitted for publicatio