Collaboration-as-Service: Humanities Librarians, Technologists, and Researchers

Part of a panel discussion at the NFAIS 2018 Humanities Roundtable exploring how humanities librarians are conveying and marketing the breadth and depth of services to faculty, students and researchers. Presenters address how perception equates to funding for humanities, and how the role of humanities librarians is changing.Liaison librarians of all disciplines must increasingly draw upon distributed functional expertise within their libraries to meet the shifting, complex demands of university faculty and students. As more research services, funded scholarship, and course projects are built upon digital resources and complicated technology, it becomes more essential for liaisons to translate user needs to developers, repository managers, and technical support teams. In particular, humanities librarians must deftly bridge sometimes large gaps in understanding and knowledge between scholars, students, and technologists to support these projects. However, the invisible emotional labor that supports collaboration within successful projects is often devalued by university administrators—and, crucially, prospective funding sources--in comparison to visibly working code. Further compounding the problem are differences in compensation for project-specific work, and buyouts that may be available to technical specialists, but not to the librarians who are “just doing their job.

Girls to the Front: What Riot Grrrl Tells Us About Women in Library IT

Book description: Does gender play a role in library information technology (I.T.)? For the last several decades, libraries have primarily employed women, whereas I.T. jobs have been held by men. What happens when the two collide? What is it like for women who are working for I.T. within the library? Has it changed over time? Through personal narratives, we explore these questions and seek to provide guidance and encouragement for women and men in library I.T., those pursuing a career in library I.T., and library management. The collection includes themes concerning "Imposter Syndrome," career trajectory, experiences of sexism and biases. Contributors also offer advice and encouragement to those entering or already in the field. Examples of positions held by the contributors include managers, web developers, system librarians, programmers, and consultants. This collection provides a voice for women in library I.T., bringing their experiences from the margins to the center, and encouraging conversation for positive change.This contribution to a collection of essays and personal narratives explores the author's background in patriarchal communities, and how riot grrrl became a foundational ethos of her career in library information technology

The Cost of Keeping It: Towards Effective Cost-Modeling for Digital Preservation at the University of Maryland

With the introduction of tools like the DLF’s Digitization Cost Calculator, forecasting and fundraising for digitization projects can be achieved with transparency and clarity. However, estimating and articulating the considerable long-term expenses of digital preservation lags behind. The surfeit of digital materials entering cultural heritage institutions introduce significant costs that rapidly outstrip the costs of digitization, and these costs are challenging to represent clearly at the outset of a project–either due to obscure technical details, the array of pricing options for storage and preservation systems, and the impossibility of predicting the price of "keeping it forever." In our library, we are in the early stages of developing a cost model for digital preservation systems loosely aligned to the costs of systems and activities within the NDSA Levels of Digital Preservation framework. This work is intended to articulate the ongoing costs of desirable and essential digital curation activities to digital project stakeholders, as well as administrators–with the ultimate goal of sustainable funding for responsible digital preservation. Our "Digital Preservation Cost Calculator" has been successfully used to estimate project expenditures in preparation for grant applications and philanthropic financing requests.We are exploring prospective features that can transition this tool from a local budgeting tool to a full-fledged digital preservation application. This paper will introduce our use case and requirements, current development challenges, and propose a prospective roadmap and options for community engagemen

Terps Publish: A Student Publication Fair

Student-run publications are valuable to the campus and scholarly record, serving as an academic playground for emergent forms of publishing and media. However, student publications face many of the same sustainability problems affecting the broader publishing industry as well as unique problems inherent in student publications, such as routine turnover, unreliable or shifting income sources, and few networks to share knowledge. The inaugural Terps Publish, modeled on Hoyas Publish at Georgetown University, provides student publishers with a discussion venue to connect with peers and library resources for publishing, and a fair on April 11th to promote and celebrate student publishing activities. This poster will share outcomes from the student round table, discussion points, and opportunities for the Libraries to support student publications

Delay, Distract, Defer: Addressing Sabotage in the Academic Library

Short paper submitted to The Maintainers III Conference, October 7, 2019.In 1944, the US Office of Strategic Services released the Simple Sabotage Field Manual. Originally intended to aid the WWII-era citizen saboteur in committing small, undetectable acts of sabotage within an enemy organization, the Field Manual developed a second life on social media after its declassification, as its advice to “make faulty decisions, to adopt an uncooperative attitude, and to induce others to follow suit” echoed the pitfalls of modern office work. In the context of academic libraries, seemingly neutral actions that actively work to delay production may include our insistence on following proper channels, creating committees, haggling over precise language, and holding unnecessary meetings. In this paper, we argue that academic libraries find themselves uniquely susceptible to unintentional and willful saboteurs alike. As higher education’s hierarchical culture meets professional norms that stress collaborative decision-making and emotional labor, we create an environment ripe for exploitation by those unhappy with the direction of an organization. As workers charged with the stewardship of information infrastructure, and as individuals who create and implement best practices in digital cultural heritage systems, library saboteurs have the potential to derail and impede the care work essential to information maintenance. This paper explores aspects of the Field Manual that apply to modern organizations, how academic libraries can fall victim to sabotage, and ways that individual librarians and staff can identify and resist the saboteur in the next cubicle--or in their own learned library behavior

Lifting All Boats: Fostering a Community of Practice for Student Publishers

Undergraduate and graduate students are increasingly being encouraged to work with faculty and researchers to generate traditional scholarship, as well as other types of projects that feature original content. Through this process, students are more frequently taking on roles as researchers, authors, and publishers. Student scholarship and student-run publications are valuable to the scholarly record, representing the nascent activities of the next generation of scholars, but also serving as an academic playground for emergent forms of publishing and media. Furthermore, students who manage publications gain practical skills that transfer to a variety of careers in academia and private industry. However, student publications are often struggling and are occasionally invisible. They face many of the same sustainability problems affecting the broader publishing industry, as well as unique problems inherent in student publications. These groups frequently need and often seek a combination of professional mentorship and a forum for peer group interactions to advance their publishing goals. At Georgetown University, Ohio University, and the University of Maryland, university presses and libraries have each leveraged their expertise and resources to research the student publishing landscape and develop a low-risk program to build a community of practice for student publications

Starting with “Yes, And...”: Collaborative Instructional Design in Digital Scholarship

Conference paper published in the proceedings of the Library Orientation Exchange (LOEX) National Conference in 2016.Improv principles and techniques are applicable in any instance of teaching: respect your partner, know your audience, work the room, jump in with both feet, agree agree agree. These techniques take for granted that this form of instruction and collaboration is new for both partners, that neither person is the expert, and that the content and situations will have to be recreated anew in every classroom and workshop. In this workshop, two librarians and former improv and theater instructors lead workshop attendees through some of the fundamentals of improv, and reflect upon how these same activities and principles help create an environment of collaboration and openness necessary to support the diverse goals of digital scholarship

How to Innovate Fearlessly: Community Notes

These are notes compiled by attendees of the Libraries Research & Innovative Practice Forum 2018 session entitled "How to Innovate Fearlessly," a panel featuring Sharon Epps and Kate Dohe, moderated by Rebeca Goldfinger. Session Description: A few barriers to innovation include not having a safe space to experiment, fear of failure, and big egos. Panelists Sharon Epps and Kate Dohe will discuss how to avoid these barriers. A moderated group discussion will follow on how we can promote innovation at the Libraries

Doing More, With More: Academic Libraries, Digital Services, and Revenue Generation

This issue brief will address program development, financial principles of the program and their relationship to the institution’s budgetary practices, challenges encountered, risk assessment, and ongoing operations oversight. Fiscal management of the DDS program shares some foundational principles with responsibility center management, such as proximity, community, and transparency, and is made possible under the aegis of the University of Maryland’s encouragement of entrepreneurial initiatives fostered in campus units; while these environmental conditions help the program succeed, they are not inherently required for the initiation and advancement of the program. With careful strategic planning and financial sustainability, such a model can translate to many other research libraries with in-house technological expertise in systems management, software development, preservation, digitization, or research data management. Furthermore, such a revenue-generating model may have potential for adoption outside of technology departments--at UMD Libraries, the DDS team has been consulted about establishing fee-based services in public-facing units. Drawing from three years of data regarding project success, cost-benefit analysis, and assessment of the program, the authors will share best practices, valuation, and opportunities for growth and change. Ultimately, negotiating the tension between revenue generation and the altruistic mission of academic libraries is a challenging and reflective practice, and requires transparency, reflection, and compelling evidence of support for our mission to enable the intellectual inquiry and learning required to meet the education, research and community outreach mission of the university.The axiom to “do more with less” in university research libraries is increasingly untenable, as budgets continue to shrink and demand for novel services continues to rise. The impacts of such existential uncertainties are self-evident and widely discussed in the literature--staff burnout, lowered morale and increased toxicity, weakened local collections, and limited capacity for ambitious and genuinely innovative work. In response to calls for entrepreneurial initiatives from campus and library leadership, the Digital Systems and Stewardship (DSS) division of the University of Maryland Libraries has been engaged since 2015 in developing a revenue generation program known as Digital Data Services. This initiative tackles the challenging financial landscape of higher education and furthers our institutional mission by offering fee-based technological services to the campus community, to affiliated partners, and to the commercial sector. Conceived of as a means to generate steady revenue to support and sustain library initiatives, the program currently represents a significant source of income for the Libraries DSS division after three years of growth, and is envisioned to contribute to other divisions in the Libraries, as well. More than standard cost recovery programs, the Digital Data Services program generates returns that can be reinvested in staffing or equipment for the Libraries, and DDS projects represent unique opportunities to cultivate talent and expand expertise to benefit other library initiatives. While a large-scale revenue generating program may initially appear contrary to traditional models of library services, this program has enabled the Libraries to expand both our capacity and aptitude to improve many of our mission-driven services over time

After Fedora: Linked Data and Ethical Design in the Digital Library

One of the most common applications of linked data technology within the library community are for digital library projects, many of which are deep into their second decade. For nearly as long, practitioners have raised implementation concerns about linked data in digital projects: that transforming and maintaining linked data requires expensive programming expertise, that the application stack is complex and fragile with many interdependencies, and that the maintenance communities are often made up of only a handful of qualified volunteers. Such technical issues present very real ethical dilemmas for digital library practitioners - is the cost of implementing linked data systems so high as to be inaccessible to all but the wealthiest organizations? Is the meticulous nature of designing around linked data worth the inevitable slowdowns in making digital content accessible? Is the level of effort of large-scale migration to linked data and maintenance over time actually sustainable in cash-strapped academic libraries? On balance, do these applications meet the needs of users as they evolve over time? These questions took on new urgency in the digital library community in 2015, when the newly-released Fedora 4 repository application implemented the Linked Data Platform specification and initiated a sea change in the digital library application landscape. Any conversations about the practical applications of linked data are inevitably shaped by the design, features, and functionality of the systems that store and serve that data to end users. Systems and application design is itself an expression of values by the people and organizations who build and maintain these products, and consequently, the choices and practices of those communities directly influence the creators and consumers of linked data. This chapter explores the landscape of linked data applications in digital libraries, with particular focus on the Fedora Commons community and related projects after the move to linked data. Furthermore, the chapter will examine the values and priorities of the communities that support these systems, and propose frameworks for future design of digital library projects that close the gaps between end users, implementers, and engineers. By drawing upon the author’s experience managing linked data digital initiatives at a major research university, and emerging practices in design justice and inclusive design principles, the chapter will link practical experience with critical theory to advocate for concrete actions in the digital library application communities