Blog centered around digital scholarship - emphasis on scholarly communication (its problems, and more importantly, workable solutions), digital humanities, publishing, copyright, new media, and so forth.
18 Aug 2014
Originally published in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication *** Zach Coble, Digital Scholarship Specialist, New York University Sarah Potvin, Digital Scholarship Librarian, Texas A&M University Roxanne Shirazi, Adjunct Reference & Digital Outreach Librarian, The Graduate Center, CUNY Author names are listed alphabetically. The authors were equal contributors. Abstract Scholarly communication outreach and education activities are proliferating in academic libraries. Simultaneously, digital humanists—a group that includes librarians and non-librarians based in libraries, as well as scholars and practitioners without library affiliation—have developed forms of scholarship that demand and introduce complementary innovations focused on infrastructure, modes of dissemination and evaluation,... Read more
31 Jan 2014
Originally posted on LITA Blog LibHack 2014 getting underway What happened at LibHack? Wait, what was LibHack? LibHack was a library hackathon held during ALA Midwinter on Friday, January 24 at the University of Pennsylvania's Kislak Center for Special Collections. Organized by the LITA/ALCTS Code Year Interest Group and sponsored by OCLC and the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), the event featured two separate tracks - one specifically catered to beginners that worked on the OCLC WorldCat Search API, and another track open to beginners and advanced hackers that worked on the DPLA API. OCLC Track Of the 55... Read more
07 Jan 2014
Originally posted at DPLA LibHack 2014: Hacking for better libraries Interested in building with the DPLA API? Then come to LibHack! LibHack is a library hackathon that will work with the DPLA and OCLC APIs. It will take place on January 24, 2014 from 9:30am-5:00pm in the Special Collections Center on the 6th floor of the University of Pennsylvania's Van Pelt Library (3420 Walnut St, Philadelphia, PA 19104). All are welcome to attend: librarians and non-librarians, programmers and non-programmers, designers, metadata people, and project managers, to name a few. The event coincides with the American Library Association Midwinter conference and,... Read more
28 Jun 2013
Cross-posted on dh+lib I am pleased to present Make It New? A dh+lib Mini-Series the ebook. It is available for download in epub and pdf format. This ebook is an experiment in publishing, demonstrating one way that openly-published works can be built upon and carried forward. It features the posts from Make It New? A dh+lib Mini-Series alongside the original Journal of Library Administration articles. Open access publishing allows us to invite our readers – all of them, regardless of their location relative to paywalls – to respond to the ideas presented in scholarly articles. Here, it has enabled us... Read more
17 Jun 2013
Twitter has moved to v1.1 of its API, which means that, unless they have been updated, apps that pull data from Twitter are dead. I needed something that could display the results of a Twitter hashtag search (or any search, really) inside Wordpress. Since I'm building an archive of tweets from a conference, I also need to be able to be able to cache tweets. I was unable to find a Wordpress plugin that could do any of this, so I've stitched together a solution. Here's what it looks like. The code is available on Github. You'll need access to... Read more
15 Mar 2013
Cross-posted on dh+lib Interactive LED public art at Republic Square Park. What were librarians doing at South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive this year? In a nutshell, we were displaying the innovative ideas driving libraries today and busting outdated perceptions about what librarians do. Butch Lazorchak (Library of Congress) kicked off the week with a great post on why libraries need to have a presence at South by Southwest. This was my second year at SXSW, and I can attest to Lazorchak's argument that librarians need to attend both to spread word to people outside libraries about what we really do... Read more
03 Dec 2012
Published in the Journal of Digital Humanities and originally posted on dh+lib In this post, Zach Coble explores the benefits of creating guidelines for the evaluation of librarians' digital humanities work for the purposes of hiring, appointment, tenure, and promotion, and offers a basic framework for what those guidelines might look like. Digital humanities (DH), as well as related fields such digital media studies and digital libraries, have presented many opportunities for libraries. These include the establishment of DH centers, the development of new data standards, new forms of scholarly communication, the creation of new resources (and novel ways of... Read more
28 Oct 2012
I've recently picked up some research I'd let sit idle. While gathering data to analyze, I realized there's no link to the PubMed citation page when I pull PubMed citations into EndNote. Why would this URL be useful? Having this link in EndNote makes it easy to toggle between articles and EndNote (where my research data lives). Plus, with a LibX toolbar installed in Firefox, the PMID (PubMed ID) number on the PubMed citation page magically (i.e. via link resolver) turns into a link to the article. This is a HUGE timesaver. There are a variety of ways to get... Read more
17 Oct 2012
Cross-posted on digitalcultureweek. I was particularly interested in a paper mentioned in Roger's post last week on Archiving Twitter. The paper, recently published by Hany M. SalahEldeen and Michael L. Nelson of Dominican University, found that 11% of resources shared on Twitter are lost after one year (and 20% archived after a year) and after one year we lose .02% per day (for those interested, there are more details on the methods used in the study in an earlier blog post written by the authors). The tweets themselves are not lost but rather the resources linked to in the tweets... Read more
14 Sep 2012
Cross-posted on digitalcultureweek. In a recent article on libraries as platforms, David Weinberger envisions that, similar to Facebook opening its API to developers in 2007, libraries would provide access to everything they have - books and online content, metadata, and conversations about that content, in an effort to develop knowledge and community. Such an idea is not radical and is essentially at the core of libraries - any citizen can check out Huck Finn to read for fun, for a research article on Mark Twain, or to use as a text for a discussion group. In fact, many are currently... Read more
05 Sep 2012
This is a guest post for The Signal: Digital Preservation and is cross-posted on their site. When I began this job a year ago, one of the first things our director told me was that the library had just purchased two blogs on the Civil War and she wanted me to figure out how they could be used most effectively for teaching and learning. From the start I wasn't sure exactly what I was supposed to do. "What do you mean we purchased two blogs? Why?" A little bit of context first. Many students are drawn to Gettysburg College for... Read more
31 Aug 2012
Cross-posted on digitalcultureweek. I've been thinking a lot about Open Access (OA) lately, specifically how the OA movement can find sustainable models for moving forward. Gold OA has been receiving a lot of attention as research funders answer calls make publicly funded research freely available to end users. However, transitioning to Gold OA creates a barrier for researchers without public or any funding. Some universities, such as the COPE signatories, have created funds to help authors pay fees associated with publishing in OA journals. However, many of these are funded through special initiatives and wouldn't be cost efficient if Gold... Read more
30 Aug 2012
This is the second of two posts on Open Access. The first post surveys recent open access developments in the UK and Europe. This post investigates how Gold Open Access and Green Open Access might complement each other during and after the Transition Period in ways acceptable to all stakeholders. *** Recent developments in the UK and elsewhere have advanced open access (OA) into a new phase. Many governments and large institutions are recognizing OA as beneficial and are implementing policy to make OA for publicly funded research a reality. In effect, these developments provide a new lens through which... Read more
17 Aug 2012
Cross-posted on digitalcultureweek. Libraries have long been central to digital humanities (DH), but providing support for DH has not been a central issue for many libraries. Of course, there are many exceptions as numerous DH centers are located within libraries (see centerNet's listing of DH centers), but on the whole, DH and libraries have had developed piecemeal and without much collaboration between library or DH organizations. An upcoming issue of the Journal of Library Administration (due out in January) plans to address some of these challenges. Miram Posner (@miriamkp) is contributing an article and recently wrote a post to begin... Read more
15 Aug 2012
This is the first of two posts on Open Access. The first post surveys recent open access developments in the UK and Europe. The second post investigates how Gold Open Access and Green Open Access might complement each other during and after the Transition Period in ways acceptable to all stakeholders. *** The Finch Report and its subsequent responses from RCUK, the UK government, and the European Commission have further stimulated an already lively debate in the UK and Europe on the subject of open access. Although many disagree with various aspects of the report and its responses, everyone can... Read more
20 Jul 2012
Cross-posted on digitalcultureweek. As a Mizzou alum, a Columbia, Missouri native, and someone interested in improving the scholarly communication system, I am embarrassed by recent developments concerning the University of Missouri Press. The University announced earlier this week this that it would not, as it had indicated two months ago, shut down the press but rather "reimagine" it to use vaguely defined "innovative techniques for scholarly communication." The announcement reveals a lack of understanding of the issues involved, poor communication and planning, and diminishes the reputation of a relatively stable university publishing ecosystem. The details given thus far about the... Read more
13 Jul 2012
Cross-posted on digitalcultureweek. Ever since the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) emerged in late 2010 with the promise of creating a nation digital library, it has generated much publicity, enthusiasm, and criticism. I attended the plenary meeting in October 2011 and the excitement was certainly palpable. The meeting began with the announcement of $5 million in funding from the Sloan Foundation and the Arcadia Fund, the Beta Sprint presentations demonstrated the commitment of intellectual energy to the project, and the April 2013 launch date loomed yet seemed manageable. However, the movement seems to have stalled: there are many critical... Read more
04 Jun 2012
I was recently browsing the Journal of Library Scholarly Communication, a promising new open access journal that has drawn many of the big names in the field for its first issue. My mind started running while watching the introductory video, and, inspired by Kathleen Fitzpatrick's recent post on shamelessness, I decided to just write-n-post rather than scouring to find who's already made the following points, etc. *** As is commonly rehearsed, developments in scholarly communication originate from the serials crisis. However, I'm wondering how much of a crisis it really is. I'm not denying that libraries are getting pinched. It's... Read more
24 Mar 2012
This is guest post for ProfHacker and is cross-posted on their site. What is the next big trend in technology? The next "killer app"? Must have social media tool? Over 25,000 people came to Austin, Texas last week to find out. Although no one app or service swept the show this year, some of the buzzworthy tools, ideas, and trends at South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive were Big data and data visualization: Visual.ly, Splunk, Show Intimate social networking: Highlight, GroupMe, Wendr, GonnaBe, Banjo, Sonar Hacktivism: Code for America, hackathons, self-hacking Curation: Brain Pickings, Percolate, FeedMagnet Retro technology: analog tele-phonographer, Please... Read more
18 Feb 2012
I've finally made it through Kathleen Fitzpatrick's excellent text, Planned Obsolesence: Publishing Technology and the Future of the Academy. I highly recommend it for its forward-thinking analysis of and suggestions on how the scholarly communication system can adapt to C21 technological and social realities. I particularly like that the text is itself an example of Fitzpatrick's vision for digital scholarship, such as the use of peer-to-peer review and CommentPress. As I was reading, Chapter 4 (on preservation) jumped out because it discussed the role libraries play in such endeavors. One quote in particular got me thinking: ...institutions will be required... Read more
07 Feb 2012
**Update July 8, 2013 The New Librarianship Master Class MOOC is running from July 8 - August 4, 2013 at https://www.coursesites.com/s/_New_Librarianship. The materials from the course will be available after August 4. The description for the course reads: Libraries have existed for millennia, but today the library field is searching for solid footing in an increasingly fragmented (and increasingly digital) information environment. What is librarianship when it is unmoored from cataloging, books, buildings, and committees? In The Atlas of New Librarianship, R. David Lankes offers a guide to this new landscape for practitioners. He describes a new librarianship based not... Read more
09 Jan 2012
History KOPN 89.5 fm, a community radio station in Columbia, Missouri, began in 1973 to give voice to groups not well represented in traditional media outlets. As a volunteer run organization, KOPN has had its share of success and struggles over the years but has persisted as an outlet for independent and creative voices. The Reel-To-Reel Project began in 2004 as an effort to preserve KOPN's early broadcasts. These broadcasts were stored on reel-to-reel tape, which has a limited lifespan (30 years at the higher end). Grant money was secured from state and local agencies and numerous individual donors to... Read more
18 Dec 2011
Hello world. In May 2011 I received my MA in Library and Information Science from the University of Missouri and in June began working as the Systems and Emerging Technologies Librarian at Gettysburg College. I have been at Gettysburg for six months now, and I enjoy the variety of my work and the flexibility I'm given in pursuing my interests. These interests will also be the focus of this blog and are centered around digital scholarship - the scholarly communication system (its problems, and more importantly, workable solutions), technology, the role of libraries, publishing, and new media, and so forth.... Read more