Digital Scholarship Meeting Notes 9/23/2014
Digital Scholarship Meeting Notes 9/23/2014
Present: Aaron Choate, Jade Diaz, Beth Dodd, Cindy Fisher, Jenifer Flaxbart, Catherine Hamer, Fred Heath, Jennifer Hecker, David Hunter, Jennifer Lee, Katie Pierce Meyer, Kent Norsworthy, Michele Ostrow, Theresa Polk, T-Kay Sangwand, Katherine Strickland, Ece Turnator, Sheila Winchester
Brief Summary of Everyone’s Interest/Involvement with Digital Humanities (DH)/Digital Scholarship (DS)
Projects included Mappamundi (global middle ages), Human Rights Documentation Initiative, testing GeoNode and platforms for online mapping with PCL maps, various projects with Latin American collections, and various arts and music projects including scanning scores and creating a database with colonial advertisements and music.
Interest included handling complex born digital architectural files, supporting faculty needs, supporting undergrads, integrating DH/DS into curriculum, using the Learning Commons and Libraries Media Labs to support DH/DS, alt metrics and the new era of credentialing, how to provide coherent and sustainable services, anticipating future needs of student and faculty, collaborating with the iSchool, determining the Libraries place in a campus-wide discussion, and thinking about how the nascent Creative Commons program can fit in.
How to Determine Campus Needs
Rather than starting with a survey, we decided to do an environmental scan. Staff are plugged in around campus and can do more targeted research without inadvertently raising expectations. We can start small and piece mail it until we have a defined services package to build upon. There’s DH community on campus that was dormant until Jennifer H. and Ece held a recent meet-up at Dog & Duck. Representation from about 20 departments showed up including CS, iSchool, and Linguistics. Next meeting is October 2 at Hole in the Wall. There’s a listserv (digitalhumanities@utlists.utexas.edu) but we have no way of knowing who’s subscribed. TIS will work with TACC to become co-owners. DH is happening but no one is coordinating it. Maybe, that’s the Libs role. Library could serve as a nexus for coordination and communication among different stakeholders.
Needs we’ve already heard about
· Server space (TACC offers it but it’s not clear if that includes students and it doesn’t include a long-term preservation strategy)
· Access to equipment/lending library (i.e. lending scholarly/digital things other than books)
· Help getting different departments connected so that efforts are not duplicated unnecessarily
· A virtual and physical nexus of DH activity
· A Minecraft server and a drone (Adam Rabinowitz)
· Data management plans to satisfy grant requirements
· The desire to integrate Briscoe materials into curriculum
· Help building an openly editable database for Arabic paleography
· Help getting recorded architecture lectures of varying quality online where students/faculty can upload their work
· Smaller needs like a WordPress site or Wordle
· GIS services. Google Fusion will work for a lot of what they need. It doesn’t necessarily require a full GIS degree to offer services.
Existing related Libraries efforts
· Scholarly Communication implementation group is currently crafting a survey to get a bigger picture. It’s not focused on DH/DS but Jennifer F. will share with the group.
· Working on a spring symposium that will bring campus together to introduce people, do presentation, talk about tools. Maybe an ongoing thing to host in the Libraries in spring when people are thinking about projects for following year.
· Digital Curation implementation group is identifying what services we offer and what services we need to offer. Our efforts will overlap with that group.
Existing Campus Efforts
· Center for Teaching and Learning use to showcase digital project and give awards.
· Digital Media Institute within CTL trains students.
· Digital Writing and Research Lab in the Dept of Rhetoric.
· Tanya Clement at the iSchool is teaching a DH class. Students may be looking for projects.
· digitalhumanities@utlists.utexas.edu, the listserv recently revived by Jennifer H. and Ece
Communication within Libraries
· We should introduce this discussion at the beginning of the next Collections Forum to give our bibliographers context. It’ll be the last Monday in October and should be advertised outside the bibliographer listserv so all interested staff can attend.
· If people miss this meeting but want to contribute, we can update them via email
· VP Coffee updates
· Use word of mouth and convey inclusiveness
· We didn’t determine how to report out our minutes
What are we?
· Not a Staff Interest Group
· We can be an initiative and don’t have to operate within the strategic planning framework
· Similar other groups that are meeting to talk about special collections access and open access, it’s hard to define what we are but the purpose is to identify and advocate for solutions to high-level issues that don’t have focused representation at the AD level
Environmental Scan plan
· The group will compile a list of potential questions to send out internally via lib-all. These questions are geared toward understanding what DH projects campus constituents have been doing and what they plan to do going forward, focusing on gaps they see in tools and services.
Jenifer Flaxbart shared the questions the Scholarly Communications implementation team compiled to ask subject liaisons, which may be helpful in forming our questions (these questions are now in the same drive folder, in the "UTL Survey" file)
· A smaller group (Kent, Katie, Jennifer, Ece, Aaron, Jade) will whittle and wordsmith into a coherent draft and run it past Krystal Wyatt-Baxter for comment. If anyone else wants to join this group, please do (especially if you were unable to attend the meeting).
· Library staff will answer the questions based on conversations with constituents.
New Vice Provost
· We don’t know whether the new VP will negotiate for DH support funding but have already seen that the new positions staff are asking for are going that direction
· We’re laying groundwork now to show the new VP our capabilities and gaps
· Perhaps we’ll complete a position paper as part of this process