Digital Library Center Blog | UF

MLA’s Profession 2011 is out and it includes six articles within the section on “Evaluating Digital Scholarship.” All of the articles within “Evaluating Digital Scholarship” are openly available (no library subscription needed), excellent, timely, and needed.

It is critically important for academia to engage and grapple with concerns over the evaluation of digital scholarship. This work is specifically needed to develop the necessary supports for evaluating digital scholarship as scholarship that “counts” for promotion and tenure. The official evaluation is difficult because traditional reporting separates work into three categories: research, teaching (or core job duties in some instances, as it is for me as a tenure-track librarian), and service. Digital scholarship is often public scholarship (and I would argue that it should always be the case) and is often collaborative, and so digital scholarship often crosses traditional evaluation categories. This is generally the case for a good deal of academic work, but not necessarily to the same extent or degree of complexity. The evaluation and measurement of digital scholarship is needed because digital/public scholarship is needed for inquiry into existing research areas, increased impact and benefit from research, and increased visibility and connection of scholarship with the public.

The articles in the section on “Evaluating Digital Scholarship” in Profession 2011 are:

• Introduction
  Susan Schreibman, Laura Mandell, and Stephen Olsen
  Full text (PDF)
• Engaging Digital Scholarship: Thoughts on Evaluating Multimedia Scholarship
  Steve Anderson and Tara McPherson
  Full text (PDF)
• On the Evaluation of Digital Media as Scholarship
  Geoffrey Rockwell
  Full text (PDF)
• Where Credit Is Due: Preconditions for the Evaluation of Collaborative Digital Scholarship
  Bethany Nowviskie
  Full text (PDF)
• On Creating a Usable Future
  Jerome McGann
  Full text (PDF)
• Peer Review, Judgment, and Reading
  Kathleen Fitzpatrick
  Full text (PDF)

University of Florida Event on October 4, 2011, 6pm:
Jane McGonigal: Author and world-renowned gaming expert

Jane McGonigal, PhD, is an expert on alternate reality games and a renowned game developer. She is the New York Times bestselling author of Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. She has appeared at TED, the New Yorker, and the Web 2.0 summit, among others. Business Week has named her “one of the top 10 innovators to watch.” Watch Jane McGonigal on the Colbert Report.

Text above from the Bob Graham Center for Public Service and available directly from the Center website here.

McGonigal is famous for “I Love Bees” and so many other experiments with games, experimental games, ARGs, and more. Her work is extremely exciting for pushing the theoretical definitions of games/gaming and for real world implications and applications. There’s too much for me to cover here, and her website is the best place for more information: http://janemcgonigal.com/

(The categories on this blog post may be my worst labeling attempt to date. Her work informs everything and I don’t know exactly what her presentation will cover.  So, I just selected a variety of categories without any real logic for doing so.)

The Center for the Study for Higher Education at the University of California, Berkeley, has published a new report  on the role of peer review in academic tenure and review and in scholarly publishing.

Report citation and link: Harley, Diane, & Krzys Acord, Sophia. (2011). Peer Review in Academic Promotion and Publishing: Its Meaning, Locus, and Future. UC Berkeley: Center for Studies in Higher Education. Retrieved from: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/1xv148c8

Announcement:

Since 2005, and with generous funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Center for Studies in Higher Education (CSHE) has been conducting research to explore how academic values – including those related to peer review, publishing, sharing, and collaboration -influence scholarly communication practices and engagement with new technological affordances, open access publishing, and the public good.

This report includes (1) an overview of the state of peer review in the Academy at large, (2) a set of recommendations for moving forward, (3) a proposed research agenda to examine in depth the effects of academic status-seeking on the entire academic enterprise, (4) proceedings from the workshop on the four topics noted above, and (5) four substantial and broadly conceived background papers on the workshop topics, with associated literature reviews.

The document explores, in particular, the tightly intertwined phenomena of peer review in publication and academic promotion, the values and associated costs to the Academy of the current system, experimental forms of peer review in various disciplinary areas, the effects of scholarly practices on the publishing system, and the possibilities and real costs of creating alternative loci for peer review and publishing that link scholarly societies, libraries, institutional repositories, and university presses. We also explore the motivations and ingredients of successful open access resolutions that are directed at peer-reviewed article-length material. In doing so, this report suggests that creating a wider array of institutionally acceptable and cost-effective alternatives to peer reviewing and publishing scholarly work could maintain the quality of academic peer review, support greater research productivity, reduce the explosive growth of low-quality publications, increase the purchasing power of cash-strapped libraries, better support the free flow and preservation of ideas, and relieve the burden on overtaxed faculty of conducting too much peer review.

This latest report on the state and future of peer review is a natural extension of our findings in Assessing the Future Landscape of Scholarly Communication: An Exploration of Faculty Values and Needs in Seven Disciplines (2010), which stressed the need for a more nuanced academic reward system that is less dependent on citation metrics, the slavish adherence to marquee journals and university presses, and the growing tendency of institutions to outsource assessment of scholarship to such proxies as default promotion criteria.

Links to the complete results of our ongoing work can be found at The Future of Scholarly Communication Project website.

The Alliance for Networking Visual Culture:

seeks to enrich the intellectual potential of our fields to inform understandings of an expanding array of visual practices as they are reshaped within digital culture, while also creating scholarly contexts for the use of digital media in film, media and visual studies.  By working with humanities centers, scholarly societies, and key library, archive, and university press partners, we are investigating and developing sustainable platforms for publishing interactive and rich media scholarship.

The Alliance has strategic partnerships with four archives (the Shoah Foundation, Critical Commons, the Hemispheric Institute’s Digital Video Library, and the Internet Archive) and three university presses (MIT, California and Duke). These  partners are providing the initial testing ground for the investigation of new publishing templates. Through working with the partners and disseminating the research and experimental methods and tools, the Alliance is working to better connect and integrate curated digital archives and scholarly publication by better enabling scholars to work with archival materials and to enable new forms of scholarship and new ways of doing scholarly work. “By creating an alliance between scholars, presses and archives, we will identify broad types of emerging scholarly communication and produce working demonstration projects with each partner press to illustrate these types.”

MIT Press has now published one of the Alliance projects, Learning from YouTube, which is available online. Read more about it on the Alliance blog, which is here.

Tanner Higgin has written an excellent essay on his ambivalence towards the digital humanities. His post is particularly interesting to me in light of my recent reading of Jaron Launier’s You Are Not a Gadget and Johanna Drucker’s SpecLab, both of which deal with the same problems of techno-romanticism/fetishism, albeit in different contexts.

The digital humanities is still a relatively new field, with roots in humanities computing, texts and technology, and many other names. In 2008, NEH institutionalized what had been their digital initiatives into the “Office of Digital Humanities.” The Office of Digital Humanities offers a brief explanation of the digital humanities, highlighting the digital humanities as a “game-changer” in several respects, including “the introduction of technology-based tools and methodologies” (ODH). Tanner’s post, like Launier and Drucker’s books, questions the emphasis placed on the tools and methodologies.

With an ever-growing corpus of materials available digitally or readily findable as existing in another form through digital channels, the possible scale of humanities work has exploded. And, scale changes everything. New tools and methodologies are clearly needed to handle the scale for current research and to explore new ways of working, and this isn’t at question. What is at question is the balance of emphasis placed on tools and tool/tech-work versus on critique, how those tools are being used, and what all of this really has to do with the humanities.

Tanner kindly states that the digital humanities has strong suits in core humanities concerns like “the ethics of copyright, privacy and open source.” I’d argue that the problem extends to those areas as well by narrowly viewing copyright as only a property right (ignoring the complications of moral rights, cultural heritage rights, privacy rights, and the context of the work), viewing privacy in certain instances and not the much more complicated issues of privacy in a database age (see Daniel Solove’s work), and viewing open source in overly simplistic terms and not within the range of open standards and the politics of open source’s “free software”  namesake.

Of course, not all of the digital humanities has these problems and what is and isn’t “digital humanities” is still being defined. That’s part of Tanner’s post and another part is arguing to define the digital humanities as having cultural critique at its core. I couldn’t agree with Tanner more, and I think most folks in the digital humanities or related fields would also readily agree. The definition of the digital humanities has to include both the creation and application of new tools (data and text mining, visualizations, etc) and the speculation, exploration, discussion, and philosophical application/integration/interrogation of “digital” with humanities work.

Tanner doesn’t implicitly state the more difficult secondary component that, because so much of the work in the digital humanities is applied/production work with concrete products/deliverables, the digital humanities has to also show its critical work in a parallel manner to ensure that one is not subsumed by the other.  This doesn’t have any easy answers, and it will be complicated by cultural  techno-fetishism which will privilege the tech-toy aspect of the work being done.

As a relatively new field, and a rapidly changing field, the digital humanities needs a lot of work. I see this as a positive situation because of younger scholars who have critical approaches to the problematic nature of current technologies and because the same is true of scholars with different types of technologies. The digital humanities is supporting, teaching, and normalizing  technology in line with other scholarly tools to enable the more advanced critical and speculative work.

Peter Suber has written an excellent summary of the current situation the University of California System is facing with the Nature Publishing Group (NPG). If a reasonable proposal doesn’t come about, UC will be forced to boycott. While there hasn’t been recent news, the eventual resolution – whatever it may be – will be repercussions for academic libraries.

The UF Digital Collections (UFDC) now have fully functioning online metadata editing!

It’s only been a few weeks since the UFDC self-submittal tool for  faculty to use to load materials to the Institutional Repository and for UFDC partners to use to load materials to their collections went live and now we’ve already added  full online metadata editing.  Mark Sullivan, the programmer who created the internal metadata editor originally as a desktop tool and who has now made the online tool with the same and even enhanced functionality over the desktop tool, released the online metadata editing earlier this week. We’ve been keeping the release quiet for a few days to check for bugs and problems internally before sharing the good news with everyone.We haven’t found any bugs and we’ve found a whole lot to love, so we’re pleased to be able to share the news of the online metadata editing tool with everyone!

See the screenshots below to see how it works (annotations coming soon), or UF faculty, UF researchers, and UFDC partners can sign up for  myUFDC accounts to begin loading and editing.

Online Metadata Editing (some of the preview views run across in my Firefox for the screenshots, but it looks great in use)

International Publishers and Librarians Agree to Enhance The Debate on Open Access

Geneva/The Hague 20 May 2009 – For immediate release

A joint statement released today by the International Publishers Association, the International Association of Scientific Technical and Medical (STM) Publishers, and the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) calls for a more rational, evidence based debate on open access. It encourages experimentation and piloting of new concepts and ideas, whilst acknowledging that the differences in the different academic disciplines and publishing traditions may lead to differentiated approaches and business models in support of authors.

The joint statement is intended to move the oftentimes heated and polarised debate about open access as a model for scholarly communication towards a more measured and nuanced discourse.

Says IPA President Herman P. Spruijt “The debate about open access is important and publishers welcome it. Publishing is never at a standstill and we should not fear change. Now that more experience has been gained with open access publishing and now that data is available on its success, the open access debate should be able to move away from emotional accusations and oversimplification. Our discussions with IFLA on this topic are always spirited, but have become more insightful and less polarised as we moved towards facts, evidence and differentiated arguments. There is a lesson here to be learned for the public debate on this issue.”

Says IFLA Working Group co-chairman Ingrid Parent: “IFLA is pleased to announce the joint declaration on open access with IPA. This statement shows that both our associations share the important objective of providing the broadest possible access to information. IFLA and IPA believe publishers and librarians have a lot to gain by supporting innovation, experimentation and pilot projects in developing open access to scholarly publications.”

Notes for Editors:
The full text of the statement is available here.

More about IPA:
The International Publishers Association (IPA) is an international industry federation representing all aspects of book and journal publishing. Established in 1896, IPA’s mission is to promote and protect publishing and to raise awareness for publishing as a force for economic, cultural and political development. Around the world IPA actively fights against censorship and promotes copyright, literacy and freedom to publish.

More about IFLA:
The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) is the leading international body representing the interests of library and information services and their users. It is the global voice of the library and information profession. IFLA promotes the principles of freedom of access to information, ideas and works of imagination and freedom of expression. The delivery of high quality and equitable library and information services helps guarantee that access and improve the social, educational, cultural, democratic and economic well-being of those communities and organizations libraries serve. IFLA has 1600 Members in approximately 150 countries around the world.

It’s always wonderful to know that researchers are using the UF Digital Collections (UFDC) in their research, and it’s particularly nice to see how the UFDC can become part of and can facilitate research. Most recently, an image from UFDC appeared in Stowe: in Her Own Time, edited by Susan Belasco, which was recently published by the University of Iowa Press. The image from UFDC is from the September 1869 issue of Fun Magazine and it provides an illustration for page 183 of Stowe: in Her Own Time, in the section “Rose Terry Cooke, [Stowe and the Lady Byron Controversy, 1869-1870].

UFDC regularly receives inquiries requesting permissions to use images in research and popular publications. If you’re one of the authors or researchers already using UFDC, please let us know!

The Pennsylvania State University Libraries seeks a Digital Collections Curator to play a key role in the further development of our electronic content stewardship and publishing programs. These programs will be developed through a strategic and dynamic partnership between the Penn State Libraries and Information Technology Services (ITS). The Digital Collections Curator will lead the Libraries’ efforts to develop and plan user focused services that enable the effective creation, sharing, discovery, and use of digital content in support of research, teaching and learning. The Digital Collections Curator collaborates extensively with colleagues throughout the Libraries and ITS to achieve his or her objectives. The Curator will report to the Assistant Dean for Scholarly Communications who also oversees Digitization and Preservation, Scholarly Communications Services, and the Office of Digital Scholarly Publishing. This is a tenure track appointment.

Responsibilities will include:

• Lead development of an inclusive, user-focused agenda for digital scholarly content stewardship.
• Investigate, recommend, and develop plans for user-focused and repository- based services to effectively manage the sustainable creation, collection and distribution of high-value digital scholarly content.
• Manage a broad set of existing digital collections and repository content, including: reformatted materials (images, books, newspapers, manuscripts, etc), publication related content (journals, conference proceedings, monographs, hybrid formats, post & pre-prints, working papers, etc), as well as the potential and emerging needs for data collections in a wide array of disciplines.
• Research and develop in-depth knowledge of new and emerging technologies, relevant national standards, and best practices, in order to assess and promote their integration into local operations as appropriate.
• Serve on standing working groups and committees related to web functionality and digital content creation and management.
• Communicate effectively with internal stakeholders in the areas of collections & public services, technical services, information technologies, and scholarly communications.
• Promote and report on Penn State’s activities through conference and workshop presentations, written publications
• Represent Penn State in relevant professional contexts and engage with national and consortial peers to identify and/or carry out mutually beneficial partnerships.

Requirements:

• Master’s degree in library and/or information science, or advanced degree in relevant academic field.
• Should have 3 years work related to the creation, management, and provision of electronic data resources in a higher education environment.
• Should demonstrate strong organizational and/or process management abilities.
• Should demonstrate familiarity with developing trends in higher education information management, including, but not limited to: Cyberinfrastructure development, data curation and preservation, electronic publishing, digital scholarship and non-traditional scholarly communications
• Ability to lead and work collaboratively in an evolving and decentralized environment.
• Commitment to user focused design, development, and service provision.
• Communication skills that will support work with both technology experts and novices.
• Facility with common standards and practices in contemporary digital library management. Experience with XSLT, Perl or other scripting languages, and/or experience with major repository platforms is desirable.

Environment:

As an outcome of joint strategic planning, the Penn State Libraries and Information Technology Services (ITS) are collaborating in the development of this Content Stewardship program to meet extant and emerging digital content and asset management needs in areas such as digital library collections, scholarly communications, electronic record archiving, and e-science/e-research. Building on existing services and infrastructure, this program will put in place a cohesive and extensible suite of data access, management, and preservation services that will support the creation and distribution of digital scholarship. Additionally, the Penn State Press and the Libraries jointly operate the Office of Digital Scholarly Publishing to explore and incubate publishing services that support the Penn State community.

Penn State, a land-grant institution, is a member of the CIC (Big 10) academic consortium. The Penn State University Libraries currently rank 8th in North America among private and public research universities, based on Association for Research Libraries Investment Index. The Libraries hold membership in ARL, OCLC, CRL and the Digital Library Federation. Collections exceed 6.5 million volumes, including more than 68,000 current serial subscriptions.

The University Libraries are located at University Park and 23 other campuses throughout Pennsylvania, with approximately 6,000 faculty and 42,000 students at University Park, and more than 82,000 students system wide. The University Park campus is set in the State College metropolitan area, a university town located in the heart of central Pennsylvania. State College offers a vibrant community with outstanding recreational facilities, a low crime rate, and excellent public schools. The campus is within a half-day drive to Washington, DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York City and Pittsburgh. For more information, please visit http://www.libraries.psu.edu and http://www.cbicc.org/

Application Instructions:

Send a letter of application, resume, and the names and contact information of three references to Search Committee, The Pennsylvania State University, Box DCC-PSUA, 511 Paterno Library, University Park, PA 16802, via email to lhrsearches@psulias.psu.edu, or fax to 814-863-5592. Review of applications will begin March 2, 2009 and continue until the position is filled.

Penn State is committed to affirmative action, equal opportunity, and the diversity of its workforce.