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)

Computational Culture: a Journal of Software Studies is a new journal with the first issue expected this fall. I’m late in announcing this, but it’s an important journal and worth repeating earlier announcements on it.

From the homepage of Computational Culture:

Computational Culture is an online open-access peer-reviewed journal of inter-disciplinary enquiry into the nature of the culture of computational objects, practices, processes and structures.

The journal’s primary aim is to examine the ways in which software undergirds and formulates contemporary life. Computational processes and systems not only enable contemporary forms of work and play and the management of emotional life but also drive the unfolding of new events that constitute political, social and ontological domains. In order to understand digital objects such as corporate software, search engines, medical databases or to enquire into the use of mobile phones, social networks, dating, games, financial systems or political crises, a detailed analysis of software cannot be avoided.

A developing form of literacy is required that matches an understanding of computational processes with those traditionally bound within the arts, humanities, and social sciences but also in more informal or practical modes of knowledge such as hacking and art.

The journal welcomes contributions that address such topics and many others that may derive and mix methodologies from cultural studies, science and technology studies, philosophy of computing, metamathematics, computer science, critical theory, media art, human computer interaction, media theory, design, philosophy.

Computational Culture publishes peer-reviewed articles, special projects, interviews, and reviews of books, projects, events and software. The journal is also involved in developing a series of events and projects to generate special issues.

http://www.computationalculture.net

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.)

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.

The University of Virginia Libraries has announced the launch of “Spatial Humanities,” a community-driven resource for place-based digital scholarship:

http://spatial.scholarslab.org/

The site was developed in response to needs identified by faculty and the site includes:

• an evolving, crowdsourced catalog of research resources, projects, and organizations
• a set of framing essays on the spatial turn across the disciplines by Dr. Jo Guldi of the Harvard Society of Fellows
• GIS-related feeds from Q&A sites and other forms of social media
• a peer-reviewed, occasional publication for step-by-step tutorials in spatial tools and methods

UVa is inviting everyone to participate:

• use Zotero to freely upload research citations, projects, and links to groups
• contribute your own tutorials and helpsheets in “Step By Step” format for peer review and formal publication
• adopt the #geoinst hashtag on Twitter and Delicious
• ask related questions and offer help on DH Answers or the GIS Stack Exchange
• post commentary on the essays

This looks like another great resource for all scholars.

Videos of presentation:

• “Politics and Resistance in Twentieth Century Haiti” by Dr. Matthew J. Smith, presentation sponsored by the Digital Library of the Caribbean as part of the 12th Annual Haitian Studies Institute of Florida International University.
• Red and Black in Haiti,  presented at book launch by Dr. Matthew J. Smith

From: UF Libraries’ News, Events, and Updates

A $2.38 million grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to Indiana University (IU) will be used to develop software created specifically for the management of print and electronic collections for academic and research libraries around the world. The University of Florida is the lead partner for the Florida Consortium (Florida International University, Florida State University, New College of Florida, Rollins College, University of Central Florida, University of Miami, University of South Florida and the Florida Center for Library Automation), which is a founding member of a national coalition of libraries which will shape and implement the software.

IU will lead the Kuali OLE (Open Library Environment) project, a partnership of research libraries dedicated to managing increasingly digital resources and collections. Together, these libraries will develop “community source” software that will be made available to libraries worldwide. Kuali OLE (pronounced Oh-LAY) partners include Indiana University; Florida Consortium; Lehigh University; Triangle Research Libraries Network, represented by Duke University and North Carolina State University; University of Chicago; University of Maryland; University of Michigan; and the University of Pennsylvania.

“Students and faculty served by academic libraries increasingly seek 24-7 access to digital content to support their studies and research,” said Judith Russell, Dean of Libraries at the University of Florida. “Developing new and improved management tools and access to these electronic resources is essential to delivery of high quality library services. We are delighted to join our colleagues here in Florida and around the country in developing open access software to support our shared mission.”

“Large academic research libraries such as these manage and provide access to millions of items, using software to track interrelated transactions that range from ordering and paying for items to loaning materials to library patrons. As the nature of library collections expands to include more digital materials — including leased electronic journals and digitized photograph collections — libraries are increasingly interested in developing management software for these resources,” said Interim Ruth Lilly Dean of IU University Libraries Carolyn Walters.

“Libraries now create, lease and share digital materials, but the systems in place for cataloging and tracking these items are based on print collections,” said Walters. “With this project, we benefit from working together with a community of academic libraries that want to change the way that information is managed in the scholarly environment.”

“Research libraries are in dire need of systems that can support the management of research collections for the next-generation scholar,” said Robert H. McDonald, executive director for the project and IU’s associate dean for library technologies. “This approach demonstrates the best of open-source software development, directed partnership resource needs and a market of commercial support providers to truly align with the needs of research libraries within the higher education environment.”

More than 200 libraries, educational institutions, professional organizations and businesses laid the groundwork for the Kuali OLE project by participating in the original OLE project, a design phase that was supported by an earlier grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and led by Duke University. Kuali OLE project researchers will now work to create a next-generation library system that breaks away from print-based workflows and reflects the changing nature of library materials and new approaches to scholarly work.

OLE became an official project of the Kuali Foundation in November. (Kuali is a community of universities, colleges, businesses and other organizations that have partnered to build and sustain community-source software for higher education.) This affiliation gives Kuali OLE tremendous expertise in developing and sustaining community-based software.

“The Mellon Foundation has a distinguished history of supporting transformative projects for education and cultural preservation,” said Brad Wheeler, Kuali Foundation board chair and vice president for Information Technology at IU. “We are grateful for their support of this open, extensible and deeply collaborative work among the OLE investing libraries. The libraries’ choice to anchor the project in the Kuali Foundation will ensure its quality, openness and sustainability for years to come.”

“The Kuali OLE collaboration comes at the perfect time,” said Deborah Jakubs, Rita DiGiallonardo Holloway University Librarian & Vice Provost for Library Affairs at Duke University. “If libraries are to provide excellent support for scholarship and teaching well into the future, we must develop a new model that reflects the true needs of our organizations and facilitates our work in a constantly changing environment. This partnership capitalizes on the experience, the commitment, and the energy of a key group of institutions to build that model for the future of research library operations. We are grateful to The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for recognizing the promise of the OLE project, and to Kuali for offering us this opportunity to align our goals with theirs.”

Jakubs and Wheeler were recently elected co-chairs of the Kuali OLE Board of Directors at its initial board meeting in Washington, D.C., on December 16, 2009.

An accomplished team of librarians select, manage and grow the University of Florida’s research collections, which include more than 4.5 million books, 1 million documents, 550,000 maps and images, and 20,000 computer data sets. The materials support every academic discipline on campus. The libraries have built a number of nationally significant research collections.

Judith C. Russell
Dean of University Libraries
University of Florida
jcrussell@ufl.edu
352-273-2505

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!