Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

“87% Missing”: Preserving Video Game History In A Canadian Copyright Context, Amelia Clarkson, Magnus Berg

Digital Initiatives Symposium

In 2020, the University of Toronto Mississauga campus library acquired the largest collection of video games in Canada from prolific collector Syd Bolton, whose vision was for it to not only be preserved but also playable and publicly accessible. Over the past three years, the collections team has been processing the collection to facilitate access onsite, and in 2024 aims to begin the next step of digitally preserving the collection. In the summer of 2023, the Video Game History Foundation and the Software Preservation Network co-authored a report on the dire state of availability of classic games, with the goal …

Zombies In The Library Stacks, Laura Braunstein, Michelle R. Warren

Dartmouth Library Staff Publications

This chapter examines "the stacks" as a "zombie category" that retains the power to shape understanding despite being outmoded. We analyze three ways of thinking about "the stacks" that sustain digital humanities: first, the physical library stacks that are part of the information architecture that arranges scholarship; second, the technology stack of globalized computing that distributes scholarship; and finally, the social stack of human relationships that make everything possible. Each stack reveals something different about the digital humanities and the patterns of labor embedded within it. Drawing on the sociological lessons of the zombie category, we aim to disaggregate the …

The Dh Toolkit: A Collaborative, Open, And Extensible Experiment In Pedagogy., R.C. Miessler, Kevin Moore

All Musselman Library Staff Works

In the summer of 2020, librarians and undergraduates at Gettysburg College collaborated virtually to develop the DH Toolkit, a collection of digital learning objects for Digital Humanities tools and concepts. This lightning talk will discuss the collaborative framework for creating the toolkit and its future in DH pedagogy at Gettysburg.

'Shut Up And Take The Mellon Money!': Adapting A Library-Led Digital Humanities Program To Accommodate Grant Funding., R.C. Miessler, Kevin Moore

All Musselman Library Staff Works

This presentation discusses how the team of librarians who facilitate Musselman Library's Digital Scholarship Summer Fellowship program have negotiated the shift from local to grant funding, focusing on how we have organized our team and adapted program outcomes, assessment, and reporting to fit the requirements of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Presidential Leadership Grant. We review some unexpected challenges when working with grant funding and how we have successfully worked within the parameters of the grant to fit our needs locally.

Final Presentation To The Library Of Congress On Digital Libraries, Intelligent Data Analytics, And Augmented Description, Elizabeth Lorang, Leen-Kiat Soh, Yi Liu, Chulwoo Pack

University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries: Conference Presentations and Speeches

This presentation to Library of Congress staff, delivered onsite on January 10, 2020, presents a tour through the demonstration project pursued by the Aida digital libraries research team with the Library of Congress in 2019-2020. In addition to providing an overview and analysis of the specific machine learning projects scoped and explored, this presentation includes a number of high-level take-aways and recommendations designed to influence and inform the Library of Congress's machine learning efforts going forward.

Document Images And Machine Learning: A Collaboratory Between The Library Of Congress And The Image Analysis For Archival Discovery (Aida) Lab At The University Of Nebraska, Lincoln, Ne, Yi Liu, Chulwoo Pack, Leen-Kiat Soh, Elizabeth Lorang

CSE Conference and Workshop Papers

This presentation summarized and presented preliminary results from the first weeks of work conducted by the Aida research team in response to Library of Congress funding notice ID 030ADV19Q0274, “The Library of Congress – Pre-processing Pilot.” It includes overviews of projects on historic document segmentation, document classification, document quality assessment, figure and graph extraction from historic documents, text-line extraction from figures, subject and objective quality assesments, and digitization type differentiation.

Libraries & Librarians In The Aftermath: Our Stories & Ourselves, Ashley R. Maynor

Collaborative Librarianship

Following her experience of the Virginia Tech campus shooting in 2007, filmmaker and librarian Ashley Maynor set out to explore the phenomenon of temporary memorials and so-called “grief archives” using both documentary filmmaking and other qualitative research methods. She subsequently published her findings about Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, and other public tragedies as Response to the Unthinkable: Collecting & Archiving Condolence & Temporary Memorial Materials Following Public Tragedies, to help fill a large gap in LIS literature about the best practices for libraries in responding to crises in their communities.

In the years since, her opinions and perspective on …

Shush: A Creative (Re)Construction, Kathleen Spring

Faculty & Staff Publications

Shush: A Creative (Re)Construction stems from work conducted during a sabbatical in fall 2017. The audio piece, Shush Me Awake, is a composition that explores the shush as a performative act. The accompanying framing essay uses an autoethnographic approach to provide a contextualized look at the composition process for this piece, while simultaneously situating it within existing scholarship in library and information studies on the image of the librarian and stereotypes. The composer notes provide additional technical details about the audio piece itself.

Visualizing Archives And Library Collections, Thomas Cleary

Publications and Research

Archivists and special collections librarians have struggled for a long time with how to show patrons what we have in our holdings. Collections have been made accessible through container lists, finding aids, and collection and content management systems such as ArchivesSpace, Islandora, and CONTENTdm. Each of these documents and systems also has its own learning curve and different functions, but even then the scale of some topics in collections or the connectedness between collections is not always apparent.

This article showcases two projects the author has worked on to assist in creating data visualizations in a library/archives context. The GLAMViz …

A Research Program For Studying Lams And Community In The Digital Age, Andreas Vårheim, Roswitha Skare, Noah Lenstra, Kiersten F. Latham, Geir Grenersen

Proceedings from the Document Academy

The paper outlines a research effort into the changing representations, policies, strategies, activities, and practices of libraries, archives, and museums (LAMs) in the digital age. Comprehensive social changes including big slow-moving processes, such as aging populations, global migration, technological change, and environmental change, expose communities and LAM institutions to vulnerabilities. How do the institutions handle vulnerabilities, how do they become more resilient, and how do they contribute to building the resilience of their local communities?

Cultural Memory In Danger: Sustainable Information, Preservation, And Technology In The Humanities: A Theoretical Approach, Casey D. Hoeve

Collaborative Librarianship

Abstract

Management of library collections is an inherently collaborative process. Spanning multiple generations, materials are selected that support user communities, striving for the optimization of storage and access at the lowest cost.[i] While established partnerships are crucial for the survival of libraries, within any cooperative network, there exist opportunities for divergent practices. Alternative initiatives may have progressive intentions, but competing systems and groups have the potential to disrupt recognized standards and infrastructure, some of which can prove detrimental to information organizations.

Abrupt format changes and technological advancements have altered the way in which materials are currently acquired, accessed, and …

Remix The Medieval Manuscript: Experiments With Digital Infrastructure, Laura Braunstein, Michelle R. Warren, Baylauris Byrnesim

Dartmouth Library Staff Publications

Remix the Manuscript: A Chronicle of Digital Experiments is a collaborative research project that takes up this challenge. It brings together academics, librarians, technologists, conservators, and students to study the many permutations of a single manuscript—a fifteenth-century Middle English prose chronicle of Great Britain, commonly referred to as the “Prose Brut.” Our project raises fundamental questions about the digital research environment. How is today’s code configuring tomorrow’s historical knowledge? How do digital technologies affect our access to and understanding of material culture? By investigating these broad questions through the example of one manuscript, we define a limited yet infinitely …

The Consequences Of Framing Digital Humanities Tools As Easy To Use, Paige C. Morgan

Library Articles, Papers, and Presentations

This article examines the recurring ways in which some of the most popular DH tools are presented as easy to use. It argues that attempts to couch powerful tools in what is often false familiarity, directly undermines the goal of encouraging scholarly innovation and risk taking. The consequences of framing digital tools as either easy or more difficult shapes the relationship between librarians and the students and faculty whose research they support, and, more broadly, the role and viability of libraries as spaces devoted to skill acquisition.

How To Rate A Book: Goodreads, Taste, And Reading In The 21st Century, Dylan Burns

Library Faculty & Staff Presentations

“What shall the individual who still desires to read attempt to read this late in history?” asks Harold Bloom. Writing at the end of the 20^th century, Bloom’s quote anticipates the information explosion that the age of the internet brought to the reader (even if his emphasis is on the unpopularity of reading rather than the explosion in options). Social media sites like Goodreads prove that reading is still popular, yet Bloom’s question of what does someone read is still salient. More than ever, reading is a social activity, to be shared, debated, and justified between millions of would …

In The Library And Online: Social Media And Civic Discourse, Samantha A. Mairson

Honors Scholar Theses

This thesis analyzes the findings of an interview-based research study of public-serving libraries in the state of Connecticut. Specifically, it examines these institutions’ use of social media to promote civic discourse online and on-site with the purpose of producing guidelines for best practices. This new research emerges from the Social Sciences, Humanities, and Arts research Experience (SHARE) Award project, “Museums, Libraries, and Civic Discourse in Connecticut,” which concluded Spring 2016.

The research develops an understanding of the use of social media by public-serving libraries, presents three models for dissemination of findings to the field, and concludes with key observations and …

How Libraries Are Meeting Researcher Needs In The Digital Humanities, Kelley F. Rowan

Digital Initiatives Symposium

This presentation will provide guidance for those considering the creation of a digital humanities (DH) lab, as well as for those with a current functional DH lab. The Digital Scholars Studio at Florida International University (FIU) was created in 2016 with the purpose of providing needed technology and collaborative space for researchers and students. We will explore the challenges experienced by restricted space and budget and discuss how we resolved these specific limitations before continuing with an in-depth look at programming and usage of DH software and tools. We will take a look at a few current projects our researchers …