12/19/11

Steering Committee Minutes December 12

1.HaithiTrust and Portico
  • Portico needs to do an overlap analysis of our holdings in order for us to negotiate effectively for lowest possible price. It is assumed that because we have so much content already “insured” in EJC, that we will be able to negotiate for a lower than list price. Director’s supplied names of campus contacts who can run an ISSN list of local holdings appropriate for this purpose.
  • HT will be contacted again in an effort to get a firmer ball park estimate
2.Operating Committee and ConStor funds
  • The OH5 VP’s needed more time to consider our request for diversion of funds from ConStor to Portico and/or HathiTrust. After closer estimates come in from Portico and HT, more information will be presented.
3.OH5 Library Directors Meeting in January
  • The directors will hold the quarterly meeting in late January. Location will be Wooster.
  • Topics for the meeting will include concluding the current NGL grant; determining specifics for inclusion in NGL2.0; reviewing draft language for new grant proposal for Mark and Alan; scheduling conference call for spring semester and greeting Cathi
4.Technical Infrastructure
  • A conference call meeting will be scheduled for January
  • The newspaper project RFI has gone out
  • The subcommittee working on Omeka needs to have a call in January and should have a draft of the portal project ready for review
5.Staff Development
  • Intermediate training for the DRC has been conducted at Denison and will be repeated at other schools as necessary
6.Campus Updates
  • Den – approved their final 4 projects including 3 student journal projects and an archival collection of the Homestead
  • Ken – has a new video archive project underway and has a call out for proposals for their remaining funds
  • OWU – approved on new proposal and is considering a second. May use some funds for extensions of existing grants

12/8/11

HASTAC

Last week, Josh Finnell, Jessica Clemons, and I presented a digital poster, Integrating Digital Collections in the Liberal Arts Curriculum at the HASTAC Conference in Ann Arbor. This blog post is a short description of our experience at the conference and presenting our poster.

Josh:
At her keynote address, Cathy Davidson distributed pencils and notecards to the audience and asked everyone to write down the skills we think students need to succeed in the 21st century. She then asked us to talk with a neighbor about what we wrote down. Even though she didn’t say it, everyone worked on the first step alone. This isolated approach to thinking and learning is very much a standard of an older model of education. As Davidson points out, we are more likely to retain information when we work collaboratively. Hence, the audience was more likely to retain our conversation with our neighbor than what we wrote down on a notecard. Davidson’s point is that our institutions should foster collaboration and stimulate learning.

With Davidson’s keynote, in conjunction Dan Atkins and Siva Vaidhyanathan, the theme of scholarly communication was the umbrella topic of the conference. So it was with great pleasure to share the ways in which the colleges of the Ohio 5 have been fostering collaboration and stimulating learning through the Next Generation Libraries Grant. The conference was an excellent confluence of scientists, professors, administrators, digital humanists, technologists, and librarians. However, though a cross-section of the academic community was represented, most of the attendees and presenters spoke from the position of R1 research institutions. Our poster presentation Integrating Digital Collections in the Liberal Arts Curriculum gave us the opportunity to showcase the ways in which smaller institutions can also contribute to the conversation of digital humanities

Jessica:
I was pleasantly surprised about the interest regarding our project. Many people saw librarians as necessary collaborators in digital projects and were pleased to have that presence at the conference. While sometimes left out of the conversations, library involvement in digital projects are essential from several perspectives, especially preservation. I spoke about the COW farmer oral history collection and had someone ask me for tips regarding interviewing. She was very interested in my work in the classroom helping students prepare to interview people they had never met before.

I was able to attend several lightning talk series that had a holistic approach to innovative uses of technology. Faculty and students are researching in new ways. Assessment of digital projects is not the same as evaluating the standard research paper of essays. Seeing how all of these pieces fit together will help me develop new proposals for digital collections.

Catalina:
The theme of Digital Scholarly Community at the HASTAC conference was seen in both the key notes addresses, concurrent sessions, and poster demonstrations. The keynotes provided a detailed look how traditional academic fields are changed (and in the case of Josh Greenberg new fields emerge) by the application of digital tools. The concurrent lightening sessions and posters brought together innovative projects from the social sciences, humanities, arts, and sciences united by their use of the digital. These quick sessions presented new and often groundbreaking ways scholars are gathering, mining, sharing, creating and representing data.

Our poster was one of few that focused on student involvement in digital scholarly communication. While the collections we've created as part of the NGL are not as cutting edge as much of what we saw at HASTAC, we were able to convey the importance of our work by discussing the classroom and how the NGL is contributing to curriculum and student scholarship. In addition, there was interest in our poster for the practical approach to creating digital collections we outlined, as opposed to other presentations focused only on the results. Overall HASTAC offered us a great opportunity to see what other digital projects are coming, while presenting our own perspective on what we have accomplished at The Ohio Five.

12/6/11

A Look at the Book: Text and Reading Culture from Manuscripts to Print to E-Readers

This event at Kenyon will use material digitized as part of the NGL grant.

The students of Used Books: Medieval Manuscripts (aka ARHS 374) invite you to an exhibition and reception in the Lee L. Meier / Quentin J. Draudt Curatorial Classroom in Gund Gallery on Thursday, December 8 from 5:00-6:00pm.

With funding initially received from a Mellon Next Generation Libraries grant, Professor Sarah Blick and Special Collections Librarian Ethan A. Henderson created this class to give students the opportunity to study and work with original and digitized leaves of manuscripts dating from the 11th to the 21st century. Come see the exhibit and ask these student curators about dirty books, palimpsests, glossing, chained books, illuminations, punctus flexus, manicules, and many other fascinating aspects of manuscript studies.

The Classroom/Exhibit will also be open on Thursday from 3-8pm and Friday from 1-7pm.

12/1/11

Steering Committee Minutes December 1

1) Technical Infrastructure Committee update
  • Newspaper taskforce is assembled and RFI is about ready to send out to vendors.  Alan and Catalina will send out ASAP.
2) Staff Development Committee update
  • Catalina announced a DRC collection curator training session next Friday at Denison.  An additional session(s) will be planned for other institutions
3) Campus updates
  • Oberlin -- some Shansi archives project leaders will present on the project at a conference at Queens University, Kington, Ont. next May.
  • Kenyon -- spending on current projects appears to be low, evaluating the situation.
  • OWU -- next date for proposal submission is December 9th; they are expecting two new proposals; $15,000 of $50,000 not yet allocated, may consider adding to newspaper digitization funds
  • Denison -- nothing new
  • Wooster -- new Pol. Sci proposal to store videos; discussions about storing some of all of 8000+ Art Museum digital objects
4) other business
  • at yesterday's OH5 Operating Cttee meeting they we're yet prepared to fully discuss possibilities to repurpose CONSTOR funding for Hathitrust or Portico.  CONSTOR funds will not be freed up until 2013
  • the directors discussed Hathitrust and Portico features and costs; Amy, Mark, and Mary talked with John Magill about our Hathitrust and Portico interests
  • Ray gave an OhioLINK update: 1) no word yet on Chancellor finding one-time funding to make initial EJC payments in January, 2) news sources are starting to report that a small 2-year capital budget bill is in the works, 3) Chancellor Petro wants all statewide ejournal and database agreements maintained, 4) an OL taskforce on ejournal funding formulas will be set up soon, 5) in January LACCC will revert to it's earlier smaller size; Ray will cycle off and Mark Christel will replace him as the independent college rep.