All Re:Thinking Blogs

Re:Thinking

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    Revealing Our Melting Past: Toward a Digital Library of Historic Glacier Photography

    By: Athea Merredyth 2 months ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    The 2016 Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union may forever be remembered for the passionate remarks delivered by California governor Jerry Brown . Governor Brown spoke, in part, about the need for scientific data to be collected and preserved, and its importance in understanding climate change. Later that week at the same meeting, our CLIR-funded ...

    1 person recommends this.
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    Thinking Outside the Box: Crafting a Culture of Library Collaboration at The Collective

    By: Jennifer Grayburn 3 months ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    Ten hamsters pile on top of each other. As one hamster on the third row of this unusual pyramid smiles out at us, another boosts the topmost hamster up. It starts to peek up and out of their cage The Collective conference bag. Authors photograph . This whimsical image appeared on each of the bags piled behind the registration desk of ...

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    Building Bridges: Creating Collaborative Partnerships Between Large and Small Institutions

    By: Latoya Devezin 4 months ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    Collaborative partnerships between large and small institutions create a platform for organizations with shared goals to work on a project beneficial to both institutions over a specified length of time. When deciding whether a collaborative partnership might work for your organization, it is important to identify common goals, potential benefits, ...

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    Building Community Around the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF)

    By: Sheila Rabun 4 months ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    If you have been anywhere near digital image repositories in the past five years, you might have heard of IIIF (pronounced triple-EYE-eff), or the International Image Interoperability Framework. There are several different ways to describe what IIIF is, but a current favorite is that IIIF is a community working together to create, test, refine, implement ...

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    Recordings at Risk: Pilot Call Pointers

    By: Pedro Gonzalez-Fernandez 5 months ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    Audio and audiovisual materials of significant value often fall under the stewardship of archivists who lack specialized training regarding their description, storage, and maintenance needs. For this reason, the thought of writing a competitive grant proposal for a digital reformatting project might seem a tall order. What are the most archivally-sound ...

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    Digital Libraries and Social Justice

    By: Charles Henry 7 months ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    This summer, CLIR announced funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support the initial planning phase of the Digital Library of the Middle East (DLME). This projects impetus is the tragic violence and loss of life currently afflicting the Middle East and North Africa regions, accompanied by rampant looting and destruction of priceless objects ...

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    Wikidata as a Digital Preservation Knowledgebase

    By: Katherine Thornton 7 months ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    Katherine Thornton, CLIR postdoctoral fellow in data curation at Yale University Library, coauthored this piece with Euan Cochrane, digital preservation manager at Yale University Library. It is a condensed version of a longer post published by the Open Preservation Foundation. Were exploring Wikidata, the (relatively new) Wikipedia for data, ...

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    Recordings at Risk: What's at Stake and What We Can Do

    By: Christa Williford 8 months ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    Ten to fifteen years. Thats the length of time preservationists like Mike Casey say we could have to reformat twentieth-century audio and audiovisual content in collecting institutions before degradation and format obsolescence (a.k.a. Caseys evil twin-headed monster Degralescence ) render that content lost forever. Those are scary numbers, especially ...

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    A Digital Library for the Middle East

    By: Charles Henry 11 months ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    Last October at the Digital Library Federation’s (DLF) annual Forum in Vancouver, Canada, I served on the final plenary panel, asked to speak about themes and topics of that Forum that struck me as especially compelling. I reported that the emphasis throughout the conference on the correlation of the social implications and potential societal ...

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    Taking Action by Casting a Wider Net

    By: Donna Ziegenfuss 11 months ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    I recently attended the 2016 Leading Change Institute (LCI) , a program sponsored through CLIR and EDUCAUSE, with 37 amazing and talented higher education IT and library professionals. I wasn’t really sure what to expect, but I was excited and honored to be there. The week-long experience included presentations by diverse and inspiring guest speakers ...

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    Missed Connections

    By: Christa Williford one year ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    One of the best things about CLIR’s immersion in the educational, information, and cultural professions is an ongoing chance to be inspired by people who spend their time preparing for a better world. Often working within tight financial constraints, students, teachers, librarians, archivists, curators, and technologists make remarkable moments happen—bringing ...

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    What would a "transformative use" of digitized moving image assets look like?

    By: Dimitrios Latsis one year ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    On the heels of the US Supreme Court's decision not to review the Author's Guild case against Google's Digital Library project (which means that at least for the time being book digitization and selective online sampling and machine-driven "reading" is safe), everyone who cares about access and digitization preservation of cultural heritage ...

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    The Embedded Data Consulting Model and the "IDEAL" Collaboration

    By: Natsuko Nicholls one year ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    Embedded librarianship has increasingly shifted the emphasis from one-time reference services to developing highly focused, targeted, specialized research assistance. Although embedded liaison programs have been previously adopted across institutions, embedding data consultants is a relatively new approach that many academic libraries have introduced ...

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    Beyond Data: Reproducibility in Scientific Software and the Role of Digital Preservation

    By: Fernando Rios one year ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    Looking at the titles of presentations and workshops at recent digital library- and curation-related conferences such as the DLF Forum, iPRES, IASSIST, and IDCC, it's hard to miss the popularity of topics related to research data management. Although describing, preserving, and sharing data has become increasingly common, the software tools, parameters, ...

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    How much does and should digitization cost?

    By: Nicole Ferraiolo one year ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    How much does and should digitization cost? It’s a simple enough question. You take the cost per item, multiply it by the number of items, and you’re done: problem solved. What’s that? You ask what the cost per item is? Well, it depends. . . what type of collection is it? Where is the collection based? Who’s doing the labor? Are there any preservation ...

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    A Pivotal Year for the Committee on Coherence at Scale

    By: Charles Henry one year ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    First convened in 2013 to reinvigorate and rejuvenate higher education in the United States, the Committee on Coherence at Scale believes that the inherited norms, customs, traditions, and institutions that have structured academic research and teaching have contributed to an expensive, fragmented, and inefficient organization of higher education that ...

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    Getting the Public to Archive

    By: Jaime Mears one year ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    I am a National Digital Stewardship Resident whose project will end in 49 days. The following post is a reconsideration of my work, an exercise in gazing unflinchingly at the decisions made to establish a personal archiving campaign at the DC Public Library and the implications of compromising in public. My National Digital Stewardship ...

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    Publishing Digital Scholarship

    By: Friederike Sundaram one year ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    Digital humanists are thinking hard about the shape of their discipline and ways to engage their student and faculty communities in digital research. I’m pleased to have the opportunity to add to the conversation from the perspective of an editor at an academic press. Stanford Press has recently begun to build a publishing program in the ...

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    Alt-Ac Advocacy: Or, How to Search Beyond the Tenure Track

    By: Rachel Deblinger one year ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    It started right after I’d finished my degree: my advisor asked me to participate in a panel about career possibilities for Jewish Studies graduate students to introduce and represent a non-traditional career path. I had just received my PhD from the UCLA History department and was about to start a CLIR Postdoctoral Fellowship at UC Santa Cruz, where ...

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    Excellence in Teaching

    By: Timothy Norris one year ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    Often we hear the adage: “those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.” Those who have never taught seem to think that teaching is easy. How wrong they are. Indeed, for anyone who has tried to teach it quickly becomes clear that teaching is very hard to do well. It is more likely that those who can “do” cannot teach! But what is to teach well, to be ...

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    The Problem is in the Room

    By: Adrianne Russell one year ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    Upon returning from any gathering or conference, it often takes a while to process what you’ve learned. So many ideas, thoughts, and inspirations—as well as vast amounts of information—are absorbed in such a short amount of time. However, if the event is truly transformational, what you experienced will reverberate throughout your world for quite ...

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    Engaging Students in Digital Scholarship

    By: Haley Tilt one year ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    Earlier this month, scholars, technologists, librarians, graduate and undergraduate students met at Bucknell University to discuss challenges and successes in digital scholarship. At the conference, “ Collaborating Digitally: Engaging Students in Public Scholarship ,” a Twitter feed channeled a shared sentiment: “a common theme at #BUDSC15 : how ...

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    Hidden Collections for Everyone

    By: Michael Edson one year ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    Note: This post was published as the epilogue to Collaboration, Innovation, and Models: Proceedings of the CLIR Cataloging Hidden Special Collections and Archives Symposium , released earlier this week. Years ago, when I was working in my studio as a young, starving artist, I heard a radio interview with the renowned violinist ...

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    Culture Under Threat and Digital Libraries

    By: Charles Henry one year ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    “Terrorists are afraid of history; history delegitimizes them,” Nasser Judeh, deputy prime minister and minister for foreign affairs of Jordan, said, quoting his son, a graduate student studying ancient Middle Eastern art. It was one of many memorable insights and observations at the well-attended symposium, “ Culture under Threat: The Security, Economic, ...

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    We Are All "Rocket Cat"

    By: Elizabeth Waraksa one year ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    In contemplating cover images for the recently published report marking the first decade of the CLIR Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, The Process of Discovery: The CLIR Postdoctoral Fellowship Program and the Future of the Academy , we (the co-editors) considered a variety of options for visualizing both the content of the volume and the ...

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    IFLA: Putting Action into the Philosophy of Libraries

    By: Kelly Grogg one year ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    As a student of library and information sciences, it’s easy to get caught up in the philosophy of librarianship. Between discussions on Foucault and Raganathan, it’s not difficult to find oneself in a universe that seems devoid of any practical application. And while these philosophies are an important foundation for every librarian, it’s amazing ...

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    My Scandalous Future in Libraries

    By: No First Name No Last Name one year ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    In the last few years I've become mildly addicted to a certain genre of non-fiction that I think of as "Administrative Scandal." Years ago I read and, I admit, loved Nicholson Baker's Double Fold , which is a pretty scathing critique of libraries and librarians and the Library of Congress and the Council on Library and Information Resources for ...

    1 person recommends this.
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    Curating Leadership: A Museum Director’s View of LCI

    By: Jill Deupi 2 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    It was an honor for me to have attended the Leading Change Institute the week before last, not only because of the august reputation of LCI (and the Frye Institute before that) but also because I was the first museum professional to have done so. I was not surprised to find, over the course of the week, just how many overlapping circles there are ...

    1 person recommends this.
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    Speak, Memory

    By: Charles Henry 2 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    Today, CLIR and the Association of Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC) released the ARSC Guide to Audio Preservation , which was commissioned and sponsored by the National Recording Preservation Board at Library of Congress. The observations and recommendations that flow across its pages are articulate and urgent. A national crisis of impending ...

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    Using Data Dictionary Creation as the Teaching Moment for Metadata

    By: Sara Mannheimer 2 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    This blog was coauthored by Sara Mannheimer and Jason A. Clark. Metadata is a love note to the future…except when it’s not understood. While attending RDAP 2015 last month, we noted a recurring question from the field of research data management (RDM) when working with partners outside of the library. What we noticed was the ...

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    The "Getting Found" Web Analytics Cookbook for Monitoring SEO of Digital Repositories

    By: Kenning Arlitsch 2 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    Kenning Arlitsch, dean of the library at Montana State University, coauthored this blog with Patrick O'Brien, semantic web research director at Montana State University. A new toolkit that helps libraries measure and monitor the search engine optimization (SEO) performance of their digital repositories is one of the products of research ...

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    A conversation between digital and “traditional” humanities

    By: Sayan Bhattacharyya 2 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    Some time in the first decade of the twenty-first century, what used to be called “humanities computing” until then gave way to a supposedly new field, “digital humanities.” At that point, the word “humanities” in the description shifted within the conceptual space of the academic imaginary. No longer a mere adjective qualifying a gerund seemingly ...

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    Cross-cultural User Research: An Example From Finland

    By: Molly Schwartz 2 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    Large-scale cultural heritage aggregations are designed to open up access to library, archives, and museum collections on a massive scale by making them freely available on the web. Professionals in the field, active enthusiasts, and members of the general public have already been building up and benefiting from digital platforms that reduce physical ...

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    The Challenges of Preservation in the Prospects for the Digital Humanities and the Arts

    By: Alicia Peaker 2 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    ⌘+ S. We save almost without thinking about it. With the widespread adoption of word processing software, we’ve become thoroughly conditioned to save as we create. Not so with digital projects. There’s no easy equivalent to the ubiquitous “⌘ + S” that would automagically provide long-term preservation of digital objects and projects. As such, the ...

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    Leading and Learning: What a Decade of CLIR Postdoctoral Fellowships Has Taught Us

    By: Christa Williford 2 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    It is now over a decade since the first cohort of 11 CLIR postdoctoral fellows began their appointments at academic libraries across the United States. This seems remarkable to those of us who were lucky enough to be around for those early days, but what may be even more remarkable is how much the Postdoctoral Fellowship Program has grown and changed. ...

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    Digital Humanities and the Visual Resources Community

    By: Rachel Schend 2 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    The Visual Resources Association just ended its 33rd annual conference in Denver, Colorado, this past weekend. While there were many topics discussed during the seminars and workshops, one topic that kept popping up throughout the week was digital humanities. As a student in library science and the humanities, I had heard this buzzword many ...

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    So what do we mean by "hidden"?

    By: Christa Williford 2 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    In January, CLIR issued the first request for proposals for Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives: Enabling New Scholarship through Increasing Access to Unique Materials . This milestone marks the fruition of a long development process that involved reading and consulting the work of experts in a variety of relevant fields: members ...

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    Does your Organizational Culture Perpetuate or Repudiate the “Impostor Syndrome” Phenomenon?

    By: Plato Smith 2 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    Earlier last month, during one of the presentations at the First New Mexico EPSCoR (Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research) Postdoc Leadership Workshop , the speaker asked the 19 postdocs (18 STEM and 1 LIS) in attendance, “How many of you feel the ‘impostor syndrome’?” About 7 postdocs immediately raised their hands. At first, ...

    2 people recommend this.
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    A Role for Librarians as Data Managers in the Life Sciences

    By: Vessela Ensberg 2 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    This is the second of a two-part blog post that discusses incorporating data management and data sharing plans into researcher workflows. The first blog in the series , by CLIR/DLF Postdoctoral Fellow Kendall Roark, appeared last week . Traditionally, librarians have been involved at the beginning and the end of the research process, assisting ...

    5 people recommend this.
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    Data Management Plans, Collaborative Research Governance, and the Consent to Share

    By: Kendall Roark 2 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    This is one of a two-part blog post that discusses incorporating data management and data sharing plans into researcher workflows. The second blog in the series , by former CLIR/DLF postdoc in data curation Vessela Ensberg, will appear next week and focus on lab-based researcher workflows with non-human biological specimens . Libraries and ...

    5 people recommend this.
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    Digital Libraries and Zones of War

    By: Charles Henry 2 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    In 2014, I began conversations with the Heritas Group , a new organization devoted to solving large-scale problems pertaining to the world's collective cultural heritage. Heritas is concerned especially with those regions of the planet that are disrupted by war and political instability. Our conversations focused on several geographical areas, but ...

    1 person recommends this.
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    Semantic Identity for Library Organizations

    By: Kenning Arlitsch 2 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    Kenning Arlitsch, dean of the library at Montana State University, coauthored this blog with Patrick O'Brien, semantic web research director at Montana State University. Library organizations are poorly represented in Semantic Web applications such as Knowledge Cards, which now display to the right of many Google search results. Knowledge ...

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    Making the Rules: Where to Start?

    By: Christa Williford 2 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    As we have reported previously in Re:Thinking , CLIR is now in the final stages of developing a proposed new digitization competition, the product of more than a year’s worth of consultation with The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, other funders, and experienced practitioners from cultural heritage institutions. We hope to learn very ...

    1 person recommends this.
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    Charter-ing a Path

    By: Bethany Nowviskie 2 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    In recent years, we’ve guided four separate cohorts of the graduate fellows who participate in the Scholars’ Lab ’s Praxis Program through an unusual exercise. Praxis is a team-based fellowship, in which six students, from a variety of humanities and social science disciplines and in varied phases of their graduate careers, spend two full semesters ...

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    Addressing tensions between rights and access in CLIR’s proposed digitization program

    By: Christa Williford 2 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    As two previous posts here have noted, we at CLIR have spent much time this year considering the feasibility of building a national digitization program on the model of Cataloging Hidden Special Collections and Archives . There seems to be strong interest among our sponsors and other constituents in our pursuing this possibility, and ...

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    Zoom Out and Be Where You are Needed

    By: Patricia Hswe 2 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    The 2014 Digital Library Federation (DLF) Forum was the sixth I’ve attended since entering the LIS profession ten years ago. My first one was when the DLF still had fall and spring fora, and they were members-only gatherings. My predominant memory of that first Forum, in November 2008, besides the wondrous and welcome ubiquity of food, is as a conference ...

    3 people recommend this.
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    In Context: DLF and Stonehenge

    By: Charles Henry 2 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    When preparing remarks for the 2014 DLF Forum in Atlanta, my thoughts fixed on a recent visit to Salisbury, in Wiltshire, England. The visit was replete with stimulating conversations about creating a new digital library from the rare holdings of the Salisbury Cathedral's library and archives, and included a revelatory trip to nearby Stonehenge and ...

    2 people recommend this.
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    Building a Community of Practice for Research Data Services

    By: Mayu Ishida 2 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    In March 2014, I started working as the research services librarian at the University of Manitoba in Canada. I am responsible for facilitating library services in scholarly communication, which includes implementing research data services. I am excited to engage in this initiative as Canada’s Tri-Agencies, a major source of research funding, are expected ...

    4 people recommend this.
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    Morality in Information Ecosystems

    By: Timothy Norris 2 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    As a newcomer to the world of libraries and information science with training in ecology and geography, I struggle with the metaphor of “information ecosystem” that is enthusiastically used to describe human-built information systems. I expressed this concern at the recent CLIR bootcamp for the 2014-16 fellows and was pleased to find that it ...

    3 people recommend this.
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    Digitizing Hidden Collections: What You've Told Us

    By: Christa Williford 2 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    Back in April , we announced that we were discontinuing Cataloging Hidden Special Collections and Archives in its current form and that we were working to replace it with a program that could accommodate funding the digitization of rare and unique collections. The succeeding months have involved a great deal of deliberation and consultation ...

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    When Good Enough is Better than Perfect

    By: Hannah Rasmussen 2 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    When I was a PhD student I had a terrible habit of wanting something to be perfect before I’d let anyone see it. In hindsight, I started to refer to this as being stuck in a “perfection trap.” That’s one of many reasons it took me six years to do a four-year degree. Finally, my supervisor took me aside and said “It doesn’t have to be perfect, ...

    2 people recommend this.
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    Transitions, Career Paths, and the Lessons of Community Building

    By: Rachel Frick 2 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    This past week, I have taken time to reflect on the four-plus years I have dedicated to the Digital Library Federation program and the community it serves. It has been an exciting, transformational time in which I have grown professionally, tested my skills and abilities, and—most rewardingly—deepened friendships and forged new relationships ...

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    A Word Is Born: A Digital Exhibit for the Dictionary of Old English

    By: Alexandra Bolintineanu 2 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    In Old English poetry, the human body is a bone house ( banhus ) and the sea is a whale-road ( hronrad ). There is a single word for “the care and anxiety that come in the early morning"( uhtcearu ) and for a flight of spears ( garfaru ) but over 30 words meaning warrior in the first half of the alphabet alone. Old English is the ...

    1 person recommends this.
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    Little Data

    By: Charles Henry 2 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    So much attention today is focused understandably on “big data.” Scientific disciplines such as astronomy, particle physics, meteorology, and genomics generate petabytes of data regularly, requiring new tools of analysis to discern patterns and trends, and to extrapolate new meaning from such astonishing volumes of information. The humanities ...

    2 people recommend this.
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    Challenges and Cohorts

    By: No First Name No Last Name 2 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    Last week, the newest cohort of CLIR/DLF Postdoctoral Fellows gathered at Bryn Mawr College for the annual 10-day "bootcamp" orientation seminar. I attended as a new fellow 8 years ago; this year, I attended the day devoted to orienting supervisors, as I will be helping to guide new fellows at UCLA. Supervisors' day, which included supervisors ...

    4 people recommend this.
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    Digital Preservation Meeting DP-2014

    By: Inna Kouper 2 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    Last week, I attended the Digital Preservation 2014 meeting in Washington, DC. It is an amazing event that gathers researchers, practitioners, technologists, designers, artists, and many other professionals and curious individuals. The meeting opened with a keynote by Micah Altman, chair of the NDSA Coordinating Committee, who emphasized that there ...

    2 people recommend this.
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    A Kit for Hosting "Speaking in Code"

    By: Bethany Nowviskie 2 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    This is a belated follow-up post to last autumn’s “ How We Learned to Start/Stop Speaking in Code ,” in which I described the motivation for us, at the UVa Library Scholars’ Lab , to host a two-day summit on the scholarly and social implications of tacit knowledge exchange in digital humanities software development. But the timing is good!—because ...

    1 person recommends this.
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    Embracing Teamwork and the Limited-Term Initiative

    By: Elizabeth Waraksa 2 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    In his 2012 article, “Embracing Hybridity: The Merged Organization, Alt/Ac and Higher Education,” CLIR Distinguished Presidential Fellow Elliott Shore urged library administrators and other leaders in higher education to invite “differently positioned and credentialed individuals into the world of libraries” and to work “together with computing ...

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    Attending the Brooklyn Historical Society's Pedagogy Workshop at RBMS 2014

    By: Amy Chen 2 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    The Rare Book and Manuscripts Section (RBMS) of the Association of College and Research Libraries met for its annual conference June 24-27 in Las Vegas, Nevada. On June 24, RBMS hosted a daylong pedagogy workshop presented by the Brooklyn Historical Society (BHS). As I conduct all instruction sessions for the Division of Special Collections at the ...

    2 people recommend this.
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    22,000 lines 140 characters at a time, or The Rose Twitter Project

    By: Stephen Nichols 2 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    The Romance of the Rose was the most popular vernacular work in the Middle Ages. It was also one of the longest at some 21,000 lines of verse, or around 250 manuscript leaves (500 pages). That’s about as far from a 140 character tweet as one could imagine. But medieval readers had lots of time. And what more appealing than a story of a young poet’s ...

    1 person recommends this.
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    Opening Open Repositories

    By: Jon Dunn 2 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    I recently returned from Helsinki, Finland, where I had the pleasure of attending the 9th annual International Conference on Open Repositories (OR2014). This year’s five-day conference, held June 9-13, attracted nearly 500 participants representing 38 countries—the largest attendance ever since the beginning of the Open Repositories conference series. ...

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    The Storied Context of Story Telling

    By: Charles Henry 3 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    On the first day of discussions at the recently concluded Leading Change Institute (LCI), participants were asked to identify challenges they believe are pervasive, that cross professional borders, and that would benefit from concerted exploration during the week of conversations and presentations. Among the challenges identified was story telling. ...

    2 people recommend this.
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    A Good Time to be a Leader in Higher Ed

    By: Joseph Shelley 3 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    We just wrapped up the 2014 CLIR/EDUCAUSE Leading Change Institute. This institute brought together a talented group of higher education library and IT people for a week in Washington, DC. It was truly humbling to be among these folks and I’ve been reflecting on a few of the lessons I learned from them. Optimism - There has ...

    3 people recommend this.
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    Censored Books and Archival Adventures

    By: Hannah Marcus 3 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    As I enter into the final months of my CLIR fellowship, it is a treat to reflect on the diversity of archival experiences I’ve had in the past nine months. My dissertation, titled “Heterodox Healers: Censorship and Medical Scholarship in Late Renaissance Italy, 1559-1664,” has propelled me into the archives of Italy and the Vatican. So far this year ...

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    Discommoded by the Archive

    By: Fred Moody 3 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    Our just-concluded stint as guest editors of Archive Journal ’s new issue, entitled “ Publishing the Archive ,” has proven sobering and instructive, to say the least. Every piece in the issue calls attention to the daunting (and possibly insurmountable) challenges in the digital age of preserving archival materials in an ephemeral medium. Particularly ...

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    Net Neutrality: an Open Letter to the FCC

    By: Bethany Nowviskie 3 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    This is a brief post meant to direct your attention to an almost equally brief letter —and to an issue of likely interest to CLIR’s Re:Thinking readers, from across the spectrum of communities CLIR serves. On Tuesday night, a loose coalition of chairs, directors, presidents, editors, and founders of 27 well-established digital humanities and digital ...

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    Un-Hidden Collections: CLIR’s seven-year experiment in exposing scholarly resources and the question of digitization

    By: Christa Williford 3 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    Amy Lucko and Jena Winberry of CLIR contributed to this post. With funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, CLIR issued the seventh request for proposals for the Cataloging Hidden Special Collections and Archives program earlier this year. Once again a wide variety of cultural heritage institutions have responded, nominating an ...

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    CLIR's Reach

    By: Charles Henry 3 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    This is a short blog to direct your interest to a new map CLIR recently unveiled that demarcates our activities during the last 14 years. We initiated this project last year in response to the observation that nearly 1,000 people have participated in CLIR's programs since 2000, and we thought it would be helpful to visualize this participation ...

    1 person recommends this.
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    Role Negotiation

    By: Hannah Rasmussen 3 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    In my January 30 blog I wrote about developing personal metrics as a way to “know that you’re winning.” After that blog went live someone asked me “What happens if your personal metrics are totally different from the library’s metrics?” I didn’t have a great answer for that—other than “it depends,” but it got me thinking. When I was ...

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    The Need for Reskilling

    By: Rita Van Duinen 3 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    I recently attended a webinar on training data-savvy librarians that ended with the following quote by Eric Shinseki: “If you dislike change, you’re going to dislike irrelevance even more.” Reskilling librarians are not a new idea. Librarians have had to reinvent themselves time and again and have been quite successful doing so. But preparing for ...

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    Linked Open Data in the Cultural Heritage World: Issues for Information Creators and Users

    By: Patricia Harpring 3 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    Since returning to sunny Los Angeles from lovely but cold Milwaukee, I’ve been contemplating the bright potential future for cultural heritage information in the Linked Open Data (LOD) environment. In Milwaukee, I spoke at a session titled “Brave New World: Using RDF and Linked Open Data for the Semantic Web” at the annual conference of the Visual ...

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    Geometry in Motion

    By: Charles Henry 3 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    Part 3 of a 3-part series In two recent blogs I noted the predicted imminent appearance of neuromorphic processors: new machines that will have the characteristics of biological computing, with the processors' wiring mimicking brain synapses. These processors respond to data based on the accumulation of past experience, and the “weight” ...

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    IDCC: Building an International Community of Practice

    By: Rachel Frick 3 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    Last week I was honored to be one of the 53 poster presenters at the 9 th Annual International Data Curation Conference (IDCC) held in San Francisco. It was a great program as always, with an interesting mix of attendees. It is amazing how far we have come since IDCC began in Bath, in September 2005. Our conversations are ...

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    Innovations Through Listening and Learning

    By: Steven Heslip 3 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    Participatory design affords us an opportunity to understand our users’ perspectives through their eyes and their words. We ask questions about their life, and they respond with narratives and images that illustrate a world that is theirs, and in which, if we listen carefully, we can discover new possibilities for library services. We see possibilities ...

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    Unexpected Alignments at MLA

    By: Justin Schell 3 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    The recent OCLC report , “Does Every Research Library Need a Digital Humanities Center?”, unfortunately represents digital humanities scholars and librarians as encompassing completely separate camps, one where the libraries are doing the supporting, while the scholars are doing the research. Many librarians (or “hybrarians” ...

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    Who? Machines. (Part 2)

    By: Charles Henry 3 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    Part 2 of a 3-part series My January 9 blog highlighted the contemporary paradox of new computers that will reach the market later this year that are designed to learn, and the digital environment we have inherited that is structured by silos and buckets of tightly sequestered information—in this instance cataloging schemes developed during ...

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    How do I Know I'm Winning?

    By: Hannah Rasmussen 3 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    Just over seven months ago I made a leap from consulting in the for-profit sector to working as a research fellow in an academic library. At the time it didn’t seem to be that big a leap: I wasn’t happy with the idea of staying full-time in consulting, I had an MLIS, I had worked in a library before, and my PhD seemed pretty useful in a library setting. ...

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    What is Your Impact Factor?

    By: Rachel Frick 3 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    This is the time of year when many of us reflect on what we accomplished in 2013, as we plan, strategize, and re-invigorate ourselves to dig in and dig deep for 2014. This past year was a great one for the DLF program; the annual DLF Forum was a success, DLF community membership is up, and we invested our time and attention in many activities ...

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    Who? Machines.

    By: Charles Henry 3 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    Part 1 of a 3-part series A recent front-page article in the New York Times grabbed my attention. Titled " Brainlike Computers, Learning from Experience ," the piece described a new kind of computer processor: one that is designed to function as the human brain's neuronal network functions. Large corporations such as Google and academic ...

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    CLIR as a College

    By: Charles Henry 3 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    Reading CLIR's Annual Report for 2013 , I was struck by the wide reach of our programs, and the number of grants, fellowships, and contracts we gave back to our constituencies. The post doc program continued to grow with additional data curation fellowships; another round of fellows were selected for writing dissertations using original sources; ...

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    Data Journals: Incentivizing Research Data Dissemination

    By: Katherine Akers 3 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    Among the obstacles to a more robust culture of research data sharing and preservation, one that stands out to me is the current lack of participation by most researchers. Research data are unlikely to be re-used or repurposed unless they are published (with a lower-case “p”) or made available to a wide audience via posts on websites ...

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    Our Silent Film Heritage—Missing, Believed Lost

    By: David Pierce 3 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    Public interest in silent films has never been higher, it seems, than today. Beautiful restored copies are released on DVD and BluRay, public screenings attract thousands of people at festivals and cinematheques, and homages appear everywhere from YouTube to cinema screens. Abel Gance’s Napoleon (1927) was just presented again at Royal Festival ...

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    Talking Amongst Ourselves

    By: Rachel Frick 3 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    This week I had the opportunity to participate in the second meeting of Aligning National Approaches to Digital Preservation (ANADPII). For background on this initiative, I recommend reading the volume that came out of the first meeting, especially the closing thoughts by Cliff Lynch that start on page 309. An update on the full ANADPII ...

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    The Data Doldrums; or, Reflections at the End of a Grant

    By: No First Name No Last Name 3 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    For the past two years, starting as a CLIR Fellow in 2011, and continuing in my current role as director for digital scholarship with the University of North Texas Digital Scholarship Co-Op, I’ve been working on the DataRes Project, an IMLS-funded initiative documenting and analyzing LIS responses to research data management. I wrote for this ...

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    Liberal Arts Colleges and Digital Scholarship

    By: Carrie Rampp 3 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    How might liberal arts colleges collaborate in support of digital scholarship? Are there inherent strengths of liberal arts colleges that, together, we can bring to bear on shared challenges? At the invitation of Neil McElroy, dean of libraries at Lafayette College, I was invited to attend a DLF pre-conference program focused on these questions with ...

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    Born Digital: Planning for Access

    By: Gabriela Redwine 3 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    When Tony Geiss (1924-2011), an American songwriter and staff writer for Sesame Street, wrote a song called “Don’t Eat the Pictures” to remind the Cookie Monster not to eat the paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he probably didn’t have born-digital materials in mind. Even so, lines like “ Picture exciting, but not for biting! ” articulate ...

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    How We Learned to Start/Stop “Speaking in Code”

    By: Bethany Nowviskie 3 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    Here’s a consummation devoutly to be wished: digital humanities research and practice becomes its best self, and finds scholars and technology staff engaging as peers in mutually intelligible conversation. It sounds like a modest hope, until you reflect on how far we are from achieving that vision. Communications gaps are deep and broad, even among ...

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    Thread Count: Cataloging Textile Collections

    By: Caitlin Harvey 3 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    Before I started my 22-month job as a textile cataloger, my knowledge of Pennsylvania German culture was limited to the dandelion and hot bacon dressing salad we had at Thanksgiving, and the joke my mother used to tell; “Kannst du micka funga? (Can you catch flies?) “Ja, wenn de hocka bleiben” (Yes, when they sit still). Now after 16 months on the ...

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    Data as a Human Condition

    By: Charles Henry 3 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    The term big data is popular today, as our world accumulates unprecedented amounts of information—approximately 2.5 quintillian bytes per day (2.5x10 18). Fields of study that contribute to this enormous burgeoning of data include astronomy, genomics, climatology, and medicine. A favorite example that helps conceptualize the scale of big data production ...

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    Report from Access Conference 2013

    By: Louisa Kwasigroch 3 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    I’ve just returned from lovely coastal St. John’s, Newfoundland, and the Access Conference 2013 , which wrapped up today . While Access has been going strong for 20 years, this was my first time attending, and I am glad I did. The single-track format and limit of 120 attendees fostered lively discussions that carried on to the evening ...

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    The Long and Winding Road

    By: Alexandra Bolintineanu 3 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    I came to CLIR by a long and winding road. From the Philadelphia airport, my cab and I drove through a darkened industrial landscape, with stilled cranes and quiescent smokestacks; through a dark wood; through the streets of a quiet town; and finally, to the dark, peaceful campus of Bryn Mawr, where our road wound along thick-walled, venerable buildings ...

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    New Leadership in Higher Ed?

    By: Helen Norris 3 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    In late July, the Regents of the University of California nominated and confirmed Janet Napolitano to lead the university system. This is simply stunning. To say that she’s non-traditional is an understatement. Most university leaders are scholars-turned-administrators. She is a lawyer-turned-administrator. She has no background in academia (although ...

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    Small Steps (or One Email) Can Make a World of Difference

    By: Rachel Frick 3 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    Last summer, a DLF community member emailed me to ask whether DLF had a code of conduct or other anti-harassment policy. He wanted to know because a colleague of his was making an effort to only attend conferences that had some sort of policy publicly in place. Until then, I hadn’t heard much about codes of conduct. After a few hours down the rabbit ...

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    IFLA World Library and Information Congress 2013: A Tale of Trends

    By: Molly Schwartz 3 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    The International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) World Congress is always an exciting place to be. There is a pervasive feeling of optimism that right here, right now, 3,500 library and information professionals from around the world are creating a roadmap to solve the toughest information questions of our age in a convention center in ...

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    From the Ground Up

    By: Elise Bonner 3 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    Before leaving for a year of research in Russia last summer, I heard from various people that the dissertation was going to be as easy as stringing a few term papers together. The simplicity of this statement, intended to soothe the agitated nerves of the anxious writer, can be deceptive and what it claims does not have to be true. In my experience, ...

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    Back to Basics, or the Benefits of Cross-Disciplinary Learning

    By: Christa Williford 3 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    In the past two weeks, I've been fortunate to be a part of CLIR's annual Postdoctoral Fellowship Program summer seminar, held on the campus of Bryn Mawr College. As a former fellow (2004-2006, also at Bryn Mawr), then as co-leader of the seminar, and subsequently as a program officer, I've been involved in this program in one way or another throughout ...

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    Hot from the Forge: Anvil Summer Update

    By: No First Name No Last Name 3 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    Summer’s dog days are a good time to take a few beats and do a little good ol’ fashioned operational assessment. I’ll make things brief, but I do want this to be an honest appraisal and not just a breezy piece of organizational puffery. Right now, Built Upon projects are in the draft stage and undergoing peer review by Anvil editors and ...

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    Leading from Where You Are

    By: Diane Skorina 3 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    Reflections on LCI 2013, Part II On the first Monday of LCI 2013, a tweet encouraged everyone to “go to the bar and socialize” after the day was over. I was tired and my head was spinning when the last session ended at 9 p.m., but I decided to get out of my shell—I’m a librarian at a small liberal arts college in Pennsylvania—and head over to ...

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    Digital Humanities Summer Institute: Stop, Collaborate, and Listen

    By: Jennifer Parrott 3 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    In early June, I made the long journey from Pennsylvania to Victoria, B.C. to attend the Digital Humanities Summer Institute, which has been held at the University of Victoria since 2003. It was my first time attending the institute, and I was not sure what to expect. I took the course on "Large Project Planning and Development," which promised to provide ...

    1 person recommends this.
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    Technology in Higher Education: It's Not About Technology

    By: Ryan Frazier 3 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    Reflections on LCI 2013, Part I Despite being in a room of 25 or so higher education IT professionals (and an equal number of colleagues from libraries) for a week at the Leading Change Institute program sponsored by CLIR and EDUCAUSE in June, it wasn’t until the morning of the last day when I heard anyone speak about “the ...

    6 people recommend this.
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    Data Essentials: Sharing and Reflection

    By: Judi Briden 3 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    Lately, I’ve become more aware of the importance of reflection when analyzing the research data from our ethnographic studies at the University of Rochester. The aim of our studies is to learn about our users so that we can design space and services to better support them. Our approach has been heavily influenced by my colleague Nancy Foster , who ...

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    Now THAT's More Like it!

    By: Rachel Frick 3 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    Last week I participated in the second Linked Open Data for Libraries Archives and Museums Summit (LODLAM), held at the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec . Information about the summit and the LODLAM community can be found with the #LODLAM tag. It’s a big conversation that spans the world, and it is only getting more interesting ...

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    The Code of THATCamp

    By: No First Name No Last Name 4 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    You probably know a little already about THATCamp , The Humanities and Technology Camp: it’s an unconference, an open, inexpensive, informal event where the agenda is set on the spot and where people work and talk together instead of passively listening to papers or presentations. There have been more than a hundred THATCamps around the world ...

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    Translating our Cultural Heritage

    By: Charles Henry 4 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    Years ago, when I was teaching the epic Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf , the class would compare at the outset of the course the original manuscript (a rather plain vellum codex that includes the occasional tankard ring stain, which suffered some damage in the 1731 Cotton Library fire at Ashburnham House in London, and also subsequently lost letters and ...

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    Proceeding from "Know that" to "Know how"

    By: Natsuko Nicholls 4 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    Recently in Chapel Hill, NC, I attended the DigCCurr Professional Institute: Curation Practices for the Digital Object Lifecycle , a workshop taught by world-renowned digital curation specialists and featuring a curriculum intended to help digital curation professionals build skills, knowledge, and community. My attendance was timely since the ...

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    Professional development "just for me," "just in time" for the summer

    By: Christa Williford 4 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    As summer begins and many of our schedules shift, it's a good time to think again about the place of professional development in our daily working lives. Readers of this blog may remember I first raised this subject in January , asking people to share their own favorite resources and strategies for learning new skills. What first sparked my interest ...

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    ER&L From a "Cross-Pollinator's" Perspective

    By: Cindy Boeke 4 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    The Electronic Resources & Libraries (ER&L) Conference , held March 17-20, 2013, in Austin, covered a wide range of topics pertinent to electronic resources librarianship, including information usage habits of faculty and students, e-book adoption and technology, open access issues and potential, digital repository adoption, search overlay software ...

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    When Less is More

    By: Charles Henry 4 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    Last month the Committee on Coherence at Scale for Higher Education held its first meeting, generously hosted by Vanderbilt University and its provost Richard McCarty and Dean of Libraries Connie Vinita Dowell. The meeting was a success, in that many excellent ideas were aired and next steps articulated. A more detailed timeline of committee activities ...

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    Extending Light Against the Darkness

    By: Rachel Frick 4 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    This is not the blog post I had planned to write. When asked a few weeks ago to write a post for this week, I prepared a draft outline about the Digital Public Library of America launch and celebratory events. I was going to mention how CLIR was continuing its support of the DPLA. It would have been a post that wrote itself. But then, in ...

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    On Bridges and Boundaries

    By: Christa Williford 4 years ago
    Posted in: Re:Thinking

    Last Friday, April 5, I was fortunate to introduce Emory University Anthropology Librarian and former CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow Lori Jahnke and Emory’s current Fellow Katherine Akers in a session at the spring meeting of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI). With backgrounds in biological anthropology (Lori) and neuroscience (Katherine), ...

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    The Brain as Computer/Computer as Brain (part 2)

    By: Charles Henry 4 years ago