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 …

Mapping Renewal: How An Unexpected Interdisciplinary Collaboration Transformed A Digital Humanities Project, Elise Tanner, Geoffrey Joseph

Digital Initiatives Symposium

Funded by a National Endowment for Humanities (NEH) Humanities Collections and Reference Resources Foundations Grant, the UA Little Rock Center for Arkansas History and Culture’s “Mapping Renewal” pilot project focused on creating access to and providing spatial context to archival materials related to racial segregation and urban renewal in the city of Little Rock, Arkansas, from 1954-1989. An unplanned interdisciplinary collaboration with the UA Little Rock Arkansas Economic Development Institute (AEDI) has proven to be an invaluable partnership. One team member from each department will demonstrate the Mapping Renewal website and discuss how the collaborative process has changed and shaped …

Crowdsourcing Metadata: The Revolutionary Cataloging Interface And How It Can Help Your Library Expose And Promote Hidden Collections, Samuel T. Barber

Digital Initiatives Symposium

The crowdsourcing of metadata to expose and promote hidden collections is a significant and growing development in libraries, archives and museums, and offers hitherto unparalleled mass-collaborative potential for digital humanities projects. Originating from the field of citizen science, the online Zooniverse platform has been successfully utilized for this purpose by institutions including the Imperial War Museum, the Folger and the Huntington. This session presents recently published original research¹ in order to analyze and explain the automated quality control features of this major metadata crowdsourcing digital platform. The results, it is argued, are truly revolutionary. We conclude with a brief …

Mapping Manuscript Migrations: Building And Using A Linked Open Data Environment For Medieval And Renaissance Manuscript Studies, Lynn Ransom, Toby Burrows

Digital Initiatives Symposium

“Mapping Manuscript Migrations” is a digital humanities project that brings together three distinct data sets about the histories of more than 215,000 medieval and Renaissance manuscripts for browsing, searching, and visualization. Four leading institutions from Great Britain, France, Finland, and the United States collaborated on this project, pooling their expertise in Semantic Web technologies and medieval manuscript curation and research, as well as contributing their own data from the three contrasting datasets. The Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania, the Medieval Manuscripts Catalogue at the University of Oxford, and the Bibale database from the Institut de recherche …

Analog To Digital Preservation Of The “Women Trailblazers In The Law” Oral History Project, Camelia Naranch, Carol Wilson

Digital Initiatives Symposium

In November 2018, Stanford Law School Library unveiled to the public an online exhibit of more than 100 oral histories of American women lawyers, scholars, judges, and government officials who helped diversify the legal profession in the late twentieth century. Called the “Women Trailblazers in the Law” Oral History Project, it is a collaboration between Stanford Law School Library and the American Bar Association. Our presentation discusses the details of the analog to digital preservation process, whereby the physical collection was converted into digital formats suitable for long term archival storage as well as online access for the general public. …

Lightning Talk: The Language Archive: Migrating To An Easier, Sustainable Open-Source Solution., Jeroen Geerts

Digital Initiatives Symposium

The Language Archive at the Max Planck Institute Nijmegen (https://archive.mpi.nl) is an extensive online repository of language resources. The archive was developed using in-house solutions, including metadata creation tools, depositing tools and an archive-browser. Development had been going on for more than 15 years, but was difficult and expensive to maintain. Additionally, some of these tools had were fairly complex to use, not meeting current user needs. Therefore, the choice was made to migrate to a more sustainable open-source solution, easier to use, maintain and to develop upon.

This presentation will provide insight in choosing a new repository solution, …

Lightning Talk: Re/Mapping The Archives: Repository Content For The Digital Humanities And Cartographer, Michael R. Howser

Digital Initiatives Symposium

The print map, once seen as a unique and preservation worthy collection treated uniquely as a collection housed within a separate library or library space, has seen a precipitous decline in usage since Google Maps and other online tools emerged on the scene starting in 2005. With many print map collections experiencing declines in researcher requests per year, this inevitable decline of print map usage underscores the difficulty in discovering maps via the library catalog, search engines, and/or via finding aids. As collection space is pinned against demands for student space, print map collections are targets for capturing additional space …

Community Engaged Digital Initiatives: Building Academic Library Services And Infrastructure With Faculty And Community Collaborators, Shannon Lucky, Craig Harkema

Digital Initiatives Symposium

Community collaborations have become key drivers for the development of our library’s digital initiatives (DI) program. While collaborative partnerships can complicate the process of getting DI work completed, they can also positively contribute to decision making around digitization projects, metadata use, user interface (UI) design, and infrastructure development. This presentation outlines possibilities for iteratively developing digital infrastructure and service offerings to support community engaged research and discusses key issues to consider when developing such a program. We will describe how we have adapted DI systems to support a range of projects from photography collections to oral histories, to locally created …

New Perspectives: Reno Street Art In Virtual Reality, Amy J. Hunsaker, Laura Rocke

Digital Initiatives Symposium

UNR Libraries’ Digital Initiatives Unit and Digital Media Technology Department partnered with an art historian, local art organizations, and Reno street artists to create an online archive, exhibit, and virtual reality experience highlighting the explosion of urban street art in Reno. The Libraries assembled a team that photographed the art using traditional 2D digital cameras, and captured 360 VR footage of the art and of several artists creating interior and exterior murals. The team conducted on-camera interviews of prominent street artists in Reno; collected permission forms; generated metadata; preserved the images and created an archive using CatDV, the Libraries’ media …

Getting To Know Our Web Archive: A Pilot Project To Collaboratively Increase Access To Digital Cultural Heritage Materials In Wyoming, Amanda R. Lehman, Bryan Ricupero

Digital Initiatives Symposium

The University of Wyoming is the only four year higher education institution in the state, a unique position amongst colleges and universities in the United States. Given this unusual status it is especially important that the university libraries use their resources to identify and partner with communities around the state to build collections that preserve their cultural heritage. An Archive-It subscription was purchased in 2016, with an initial goal of capturing university related materials. In an effort to expand the scope and meaningfulness of the web archive, a project has been undertaken to use university and statewide relationships to build …

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 …

Building Capacity For Dh Work In The Library And Beyond, Ashley Sanders

Digital Initiatives Symposium

Using the Claremont Colleges Library as a case study, this interactive, workshop-style presentation offers ideas and suggestions about how to build capacity within the library and the broader campus community to support and advance Digital Humanities (DH) projects, as well as digital scholarship more broadly. Through workshops, spring symposia, summer institutes, and introductory short courses for faculty, grad students, and librarians, the Claremont Colleges Library has become an integral part of the DH community and digital skilling process at the colleges.

To meet the needs of interested but inexperienced faculty members, Digital Scholarship Coordinator, Dr. Ashley Sanders, offers a six-week …