Digital Library Center Blog | UF

Full job announcement: http://www.libraries.rutgers.edu/rul/hr/libpersonnel/APP197.pdf

RESPONSIBILITIES: The Rutgers University Libraries seek an experienced, innovative, and service-oriented librarian to fill the new position of Digital Humanities Librarian in the John Cotton Dana Library on the Newark Campus of Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Reporting to the Assistant Chancellor and Director of the John Cotton Dana Library and under the direction of the Head of Public Services for the Dana Library, the Digital Humanities Librarian will provide support to faculty and students through the integration of digital resources, methodologies, technologies, and analytical tools with traditional resources and approaches to research and instruction in the humanities. The position includes faculty liaison responsibilities, particularly with the Department of Arts, Culture and Media, for research assistance, information literacy, and collection development. The Digital Humanities Librarian will advise teaching faculty on the creation and curation of digital objects in a variety of image, audio, and video formats, fostering collaboration between scholars, technologists, and information specialists and will offer leadership in identifying, understanding, evaluating, and implementing emerging technologies based on their pedagogical, presentation, and research uses in the fields of visual and performing arts as well as writing and journalism. Will also work with the other Dana librarians to identify and shepherd digital projects involving Dana and the Institute of Jazz Studies collections from inception to completion. Participates as a member of the Public Services team, a team of library faculty committed to providing first rate public services to a diverse academic community. Responsibilities include reference and research assistance, including participation in virtual reference services, collaborating with faculty in the development of course information literacy sessions, and collection development of resources that support the humanities. This is a tenure track appointment. As a member of a university-wide faculty, the Digital Humanities Librarian is expected to routinely participate in system-wide initiatives, committees, and task forces, and to actively pursue and participate in research, publication, and in professional associations.

QUALIFICATIONS:
Required: ALA-accredited Master’s degree in Library and Information Science. Degree in a humanities discipline, or strong humanities reference experience. Knowledge of the research and instructional needs of humanities faculty. Experience in an academic library environment, including reference and public services. Knowledge of metadata schema (MARC, MODS, METS, EAD, TEI, or Dublin Core) and library applications of emerging technologies. Good communication and interpersonal skills. Skill in collaboration and teamwork in an academic environment. Strong service orientation and understanding of user needs. Awareness of national issues and trends in academic librarianship and scholarly communication, and the ability and desire to meet tenure and promotion requirements.

Desired: Familiarity with literary and linguistic computing, including software for qualitative data analysis such as ATLAS.ti or NVivo, that will enhance the teaching and learning environment at Rutgers University. Experience with one or more of the following technologies: XML, XML Schema, XSLT, Dynamic HTML. Familiarity with data modeling or data visualization. Knowledge of database design and best practices in digitization.

SALARY: Salary and rank will be commensurate with qualifications and experience.

STATUS/BENEFITS: Faculty status, calendar year appointment, retirement plans, life/health insurance, prescription drug, dental and eyeglass plans, tuition remission, one month vacation.

LIBRARY AND UNIVERSITY PROFILE: Rutgers University is a member of the Association of American Universities. The university, spread over three regional campuses, includes over 50,000 graduate and undergraduate students and 2,500 faculty, engaged in numerous degree-granting, research, and professional programs in all disciplines, as well as a broad spectrum of service programs for the state. Situated on 35 acres in downtown Newark, Rutgers-Newark is part of a dynamic urban environment and is positioned to take a leading role in the further revitalization of Newark. The Newark campus is a doctoral-degree granting research institution, classified as a Carnegie Research Intensive institution. Rutgers-Newark offers 14 doctoral programs: American studies, applied physics, behavioral and neural science, biology, chemistry, criminal justice, global affairs, management, mathematical sciences, nursing, psychology, public administration, and urban systems. With more than 11,000 graduate and undergraduate students and anticipated growth in the student body, as well as in the number of resident students, the Rutgers-Newark Campus is the nation’s most diverse national university campus. The Rutgers University Libraries (RUL), comprised of libraries on the University’s Camden, New Brunswick, and Newark campuses, all reporting to the Vice President for Information Services and University Librarian, operate as a unified library system with coordinated public services, technical services, and collection development. The Libraries have a staff of 304, a budget of $21 million, and holdings numbering more than 3.6 million volumes. Rutgers University Libraries are a member of ARL, CRL, Lyrasis, NERL, and VALE, and use SirsiDynix and OCLC as their primary bibliographic utilities. The John Cotton Dana Library, in conjunction with the other Rutgers libraries, provides services and support for the Newark campus. The Dana Library includes 12 library faculty and 25 staff positions, with a budget of $2.7 million. The world-renowned Institute of Jazz Studies, a special collections unit of the John Cotton Dana Library, is the world’s largest jazz archive. With over 100,000 sound recordings, 100 distinct archival collections, over 30,000 photographs, extensive oral history collections, books, jazz periodicals, musical instruments and other memorabilia, the Institute of Jazz Studies supports research by students at all levels, scholars and writers from around the world, musicians, arts institutions, record labels, and the media. The university’s highly regarded Masters of Arts Program in Jazz History and Research is supported directly by IJS collections and staff. The Institute also maintains an active outreach program, furthering jazz education in many ways, and supports scholarship through the publication of the Annual Review of Jazz Studies, the leading English-language scholarly jazz journal, and the Studies in Jazz monograph series. For more information go to the RUL website: http://www.libraries.rutgers.edu and to learn about the Dana Library and Newark Campus go to: http://library.newark.rutgers.edu. Rutgers is an ADVANCE institution, committed to increase diversity and the participation and advancement of women in the STEM disciplines.

TO APPLY: CONSIDERATION OF APPLICATIONS WILL BEGIN IMMEDIATELY. To apply please email your application in Word format (include cover letter and where you saw the position advertised, resume, and names of three references) to: Sandra Troy, (APP. 197 ), University Libraries Human Resources Manager, Rutgers University Libraries, 169 College Avenue, New Brunswick, NJ 08901-1163, email: rulhr@rulmail.rutgers.edu, FAX: 732-932-7637

Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, is an equal-opportunity, affirmative-action employer. The Libraries are strongly and actively committed to diversity, and seek candidates who will contribute creatively to the University’s multicultural environment.

News: JISC-led Strategic Content Alliance and Ithaka S+R release final report on their Case Studies in Sustainability, revealing how different business models fared during the economic downturn

6 October New York, NY and London, UK–Ithaka S+R, with funding from the JISC-led Strategic Content Alliance, released today “Revenue, Recession, Reliance: Revisiting the SCA/Ithaka S+R Case Studies in Sustainability,” a report that reviews the impact of tumultuous times on the business models of 12 digital projects first profiled by S+R in 2009.

Some of the projects profiled include the UK’s National Archives’ Licensed Internet Associates programme, which has shown major revenue growth in recent years despite budget cuts felt by the entire institution; Cornell University’s eBird, which has experimented with partnerships to develop new revenue generating offerings for users; and the University of Southampton’s Library Digitisation Unit, which has made strategic choices to better align its mission with that of the university.

Nearly all of the projects profiled live under the umbrella of larger institutions.  One of the key findings to emerge is that many of these projects are relying on their host institutions for support to an even greater extent than two years ago. Whether this is a good arrangement and what this means for their future remains to be seen.

“While some project leaders have pursued an aggressive awareness-building strategy within their host institutions as a way of ensuring ongoing support, others have preferred to fly under the radar,” commented co-author and Ithaka S+R program manager, Nancy Maron. “Either way, where host support is a major part of the sustainability plan, aligning project goals with the host’s mission is especially important.”

The report notes that difficult economic times have called for deep across-the-board spending cuts at many organizations, which can deny digital resource projects the capital investment they need just as they are beginning to grow. Many of the projects studied had the intention of contributing revenue to their host, but only some were successful in doing so, and even those were unable to fully support their ongoing costs.

“This research concentrates on organizations coming to terms with the long term liabilities incurred in digital projects and post grant funding,” stated Stuart Dempster, Director of the JISC-led Strategic Content Alliance.  “It’s not just the actions the project teams have taken but the reasoning behind those choices that will help others start to determine which strategies, or parts of them, might serve as models for their own projects.”

The projects that had the most success did not follow one particular business model but rather spent a tremendous time understanding all of their stakeholders–from their users to university administrators and volunteers.

“There is no single path to sustainability,” stated Kevin Guthrie, president of ITHAKA. “Successful projects understand the value they offer to their most important constituents and are able to adjust their approaches to meet new challenges and changing conditions.”

The cases covered include scholar-led initiatives (Electronic Enlightenment, eBird, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London, the National Science Digital Library MSP2: Middle School Math and Science Pathway, the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae), library and museum projects (The National Archives, L’Institut national de l’audiovisuel, the University of Southampton Library Digitisation Unit, V&A Images), and publishing projects (Hindawi, DigiZeitschriften) with a diverse range of revenue models (e.g., subscription-based projects, endowment-funded resources, and open access digital libraries).

These case studies form part of a long term commitment by the Strategic Content Alliance to provide empirically-based evidence freely to education, research and cultural bodies in the development of digital content. This research is ongoing with the development of a new digital entrepreneurship syllabus due for delivery in summer 2012.

About Ithaka S+R
Ithaka S+R is a not-for-profit strategic consulting and research service that focuses on the transformation of scholarship and teaching in an online environment, with the goal of identifying the critical issues facing our community and acting as a catalyst for change.  Ithaka S+R is part of ITHAKA, a not-for-profit organization that helps the academic community use digital technologies to preserve the scholarly record and to advance research and teaching in sustainable ways.
About the Strategic Content Alliance
The JISC-led Strategic Content Alliance is a unique collaboration initiative funded by public sector organisations, all different, but all deeply involved in the creation, management and exploitation of digital content for the common good. These are: JISC, British Library, BBC, Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA), and the Wellcome Library. The Alliance aims to maximise financial and intellectual investment in digital content through a more systematic approach to pooling and co-ordinating activity.

About JISC
JISC is the UK’s technology consortium for higher and further education–supporting UK research, teaching and learning to ensure it remains world class.

Due to enthusiastic response to our 2011 HASTAC Conference CFP, and due to conflicts with summer travels and holidays, HASTAC has decided to reschedule the deadline to September 15, 2011.

The University of Michigan will be hosting the 2011 annual HASTAC Conference face-to-face on its Ann Arbor campus December 2 and 3. We invite proposals for presentations on the general theme of Digital Scholarly Communication.

Deadline for submission is September 15, 2011. Proposals can be submitted here: http://tinyurl.com/HASTAC2011-Proposal

They seek topics which may range over but need not be restricted to, the role of digital technologies in:

• Reformulating scholarly projects and products. (This might include questions of narration and argumentation, evidence and epistemology, interactivity, and/or text/visual presentation.)
• Re-mapping the routes through which scholarly products circulate.
• Expanding the digital arts to include the humanities and vice versa.
• Reshaping the global system of knowledge production in the humanities in terms of access, circulation, exchange and equity within the global north and between the global north and south.
• Generating new kinds of research and teaching partnerships.

Topics may also include:

• Copyright challenges and strategies for digital scholarly communication.
• Web design and digitization of archives for multiple and different constituencies (local communities, global peers).
• New forms of research, digitally based, in the humanities.

The middle part of the day on both December 2 and 3 will be given over to concurrent sessions. People may present in any of three formats:

• An individual five-minute “lightening” talk or ten-minute lecture-style presentation, with or without technology (e.g., PPT, Prezi)
• A panel on a common theme with short presentations to allow for discussion time, with or without technology
• A poster project or demo for conversation in a digital display area (e.g., YouTube or other presentation format uploaded to conference website; laptop-based video on a continuous loop, slidecast, interactive website; print poster board)

Presenters will have the option of pre-circulating materials on the website before and during the conference. Information on an Unconference event for December 1 forthcoming).

Deadline for submission is September 15, 2011. Proposals can be submitted here: http://tinyurl.com/HASTAC2011-Proposal

The Digital Library of the Caribbean’s diverse partners serve an international community of scholars, students, and citizens by working together to preserve and to provide enhanced electronic access to cultural, historical, legal, governmental, and research materials in a common web space with a multilingual interface.

Please read our latest newsletter to learn about new partners, new content and new technologies available in dLOC.

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If it has been a while since you’ve been to www.dloc.com, we encourage you to browse our more than 1.5 million pages of content. Enjoy reading more about dLOC in the newsletter and please contact us with any questions or suggestions.

Also, we encourage you to forward the newsletter to any professional associations or colleagues that are interested in the region!

News from DLF:

DLF has awarded $50,000 to fund research on business cases for new service development in research libraries.

The project will develop guidance for academic libraries seeking to support innovative services such as publishing and data management activities on their campuses.

Librarians from four universities and OCLC will investigate business-planning literature and study established publishing and data curation services. The project will result in a series of publications, to be published between fall 2011 and August 2012, that will suggest a model for the business planning of new ventures and services. The model will help libraries determine whether a new service is feasible and, if so, how to make a persuasive case for the resources required.

“Libraries have vast expertise in structuring and managing data, and knowledge about how readers connect to published products,” said Mike Furlough of Penn State University.

“As scholarly publishing and scientific research evolve, we have seen new directives from the NIH and other government agencies requiring that researchers give considered thought to the future life of research products of many types,” said Furlough. “We see important roles for libraries in support of our researchers, but only if our community can build and sustain these types of programs.”

The project team also includes Theodore Fons, OCLC; Carol Hunter, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill; Elizabeth Kirk, Dartmouth College; and Michele Reid, North Dakota State University. The team formed out of the 2010 Senior Fellows Program at University of California, Los Angeles, a professional development program for senior level academic librarians sponsored by the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies and led by Beverly Lynch.

Judy Luther, president of Informed Strategies, will advise the project and facilitate discussions as the team analyzes the relevant literature, develops a model, selects case study candidates, digests outcomes, and shapes a final report.

The team hopes that the lessons learned will be applicable to other library service areas. “In today’s economic and information environment, we must be able to analyze and justify every service we offer and become more comfortable with evaluating potential new service areas,” said Hunter. “This method and our conclusions will provide a model for doing that.”

From the DLF website.

At the end of April, arXiv posted an update on their sustainability initiative. This and all arXiv sustainability work should be mandatory reading for all who are working on large, collaborative digital initiatives. Recent updates include the 2011 projected budget and the full support documentation are also available.

E-SCIENCE LIBRARIAN
The Brown University Library invites applications for the newly-established position of E-Science Librarian. As the Library’s primary liaison for scientific data management, the E-Science Librarian plays a central role in developing library services and guidelines to support scientific research. Together with other Scholarly Resources Librarians, the Center for Digital Scholarship and relevant library and campus partners, the E-Science Librarian will work to increase the Library’s ability to collect and provide access to scientific data, and will act as a resource for students and faculty grappling with issues of data curation, digital methods for scientific research, and emerging digital resources. The E-Science Librarian will contribute to the development of data management plans for funded projects, and will assist in data extraction, reporting, and monitoring compliance with established data management protocols. S/he will contribute to the work of the Brown Digital Repository by helping to develop the requirements and work flows necessary to support research at Brown; by advising teaching faculty on the management of data and providing technical support for use of analytical tools; and in serving as an agent between researchers and the Library’s repository.

The successful candidate will maintain a strong level of competence in scholarly communications issues such as copyright, open access, repositories, data curation, and licensing of online resources. Similarly, the candidate will also maintain competence with tools and methodologies for computationally centered, data-driven research (data mining, visualization, etc.). S/he will also use his/her knowledge of available print and electronic resources to build appropriate collections and to advocate for the fields to which he/she is assigned. To fulfill these responsibilities successfully, the E-Sciences Librarian will be someone with a strong academic background in the sciences and have significant hands-on experience with relevant technologies and applications.

Qualifications:

• Advanced degree in physical or life sciences, data curation, or related disciplines
• 3-5 years of experience working in the field.
• An understanding of the research process as demonstrated by academic or work experience.
• Demonstrated knowledge of issues and technical challenges related to data management/curation, including format migration, preservation, metadata, data retrieval and use issues.
• Familiarity with one or more current scientific data and metadata conventions.
• Experience with one of the commonly used repository platforms (Fedora used locally).
• The ability to acquire new technological skills and resolve problems in a resourceful and timely manner.
• Demonstrated capacity to work effectively and collegially with staff at all levels as well as with faculty and students.
• Evidence of the ability to communicate effectively, both orally and in writing; strong analytical and organizational skills; ability to manage time and multiple projects in a complex, changing environment with a positive, flexible, creative and innovative attitude.
• Grant writing experience and familiarity with federal funding requirements.

Preferred:

• Experience working with relational databases and XML
• Two to three years relevant data management experience in academic or corporate setting

To apply for this position (JOB#B01291), please visit Brown’s Online Employment website (https://careers.brown.edu), complete an application online, attach documents, and submit for immediate consideration. Documents should include cover letter, resume, and the names and e-mail addresses of three references. Review of applications will continue until the position is filled; applications received by April 18, 2011 will receive first consideration. Brown University is an Equal Opportunity/ Affirmative Action Employer.

?The first version of the Archives Portal Europe is now online: www.archivesportaleurope.eu

Archives Portal Europe allows users to search across the:

• the holdings of 47 institutions
• 7.794.952 descriptive units
• 725.406 digital archival objects

The site is still in beta, but it already looks great and more great things are sure to come based on the site’s excellent documentation.

The Council on Library and Information Resources’ Digital Library Federation program and centerNet are delighted to announce today their formal alliance. Established in 1995, the Digital Library Federation is a community of library practitioners engaged and committed to building and sustaining digital libraries through collaborative effort and establishing best practices. The DLF community includes project managers, code developers, and digital curators.

The affiliation will focus on areas where digital libraries and digital humanities converge and need further exploration and understanding of each community’s roles and responsibilities. Areas of likely collaboration include the following:

• Data Curation–examining options for the preservation of digital scholarship objects and workflows, and digital products of research and instruction;
• Cyberinfrastructure–exploring interoperability, data mining, shared infrastructure, and linked open data;
• Internationalization–sharing work with international networks to increase awareness and cooperation; improving communities’ awareness of and influence on international initiatives;
• Scaling up and scaling down–working with Google books, HATHI Trust, and the Digital Public Library of America to explore the meaning of aggregating data, and the new types of research questions that can be asked using huge digital libraries; also examining how to leverage smaller scoped work, and understanding the unique preservation challenges this scholarship presents;
• Career paths–highlighting career opportunities in fields of digital humanities and digital libraries to better understand changing professional roles;
• Publication and distribution—exploring how we share research efforts to better inform practice.

I’m always looking for other project examples of digital humanities and digital library collaborations. I’m especially interested in small and mid-scale examples, where researchers have data sets of digital files of their primary research materials. In some cases, these may be statistical data sets and in others these may be sets of files representing textual documents, image documents, artifacts, and others. Good examples of these data sets  can be used to show how much primary resource documentation and digitization researchers conduct, how these resources are part of and inform the scholarly process, and how sharing these resources can enrich the final research publications and entire fields of research. Simpler examples of digital humanities’ needs are particularly useful because they show how researchers can do what they’re already doing, and how they and their field can benefit from collaborating with digital libraries to share their primary resources.

I recently learned about a great example of a collaborative digital library and digital humanities project at The Florida State University (FSU). The project has been completed and an article was published on it in 2008 (article: Plato L. Smith II, (2008) “Where IR you?: Using “open access” to extend the reach and richness of faculty research within a university”, OCLC Systems & Services, Vol. 24 Iss: 3, pp.174 – 184). The project was a collaboration between the FSU Libraries and an FSU anthropology faculty member, Cheryl Ward. Ward had 800+ artifact images of the Sadana Island Shipwreck Excavation of 1995-1998 in Egypt. The digital files for these were stored in an office on disc and had no metadata. Thus, accessibility and the supports for preservation were concerns. The collaboration for this project created a digital archive for the digital images of the Sadana Island artifacts, including creating metadata, and the digital files were archived within the FSU Institutional Repository (IR). The metadata for the images is here and the image view is here. Ward’s research includes many publications and news stories, as well as a wonderfully illustrated document entitled “Chinese Porcelain for the Ottoman Court: Sadana Island, Egypt.”

While this project is a relatively simple example, with a single set of images that could all be grouped together, it’s also a great example. It’s great because it clearly illustrates how easily digital humanities and digital libraries can collaborate together to create new, organized resources that support the collaborating researcher’s needs and scholarly work more broadly through access to primary materials with a specific research context to support the primary materials.

Selected References

• Sadana Island artifacts, in FSU’s Institutional Repository
• Plato L. Smith II, (2008) “Where IR you?: Using “open access” to extend the reach and richness of faculty research within a university”, OCLC Systems & Services, Vol. 24 Iss: 3, pp.174 – 184