Overseas Study, Digitally Mediated

One of our newer approaches to digital projects follows a model something like this:

• we work with a faculty member to conceive of an evidence-based assignment for a particular class
• students in a class go out in the field gather evidence with cameras or through other means
• they analyze the evidence
• the library helps them organize the evidence and analysis and present it on the web

We first followed this model in last fall's New York City Graffiti Art Project. Then did another variation on it for a Perspectives in Biology course in which students gathered and classified spiders in the area. This fall, students studying abroad in India have been documenting their experiences using a kind of flickr mashup. It provides a venue for students on the program to photograph things, describe them, and classify them according to a particular schema. The schema is oriented around topics that the students must address for an assignment including modernization, environment, culture and religion. Our site aggregates all the entries for the entire group of students so that their work may be viewed as an integrated whole.

One of the benefits of this kind of project is that the student work becomes highly visible to other students and perhaps this incentivizes higher quality work. The documentation also has the potential to enrich the entire web.

We have a couple other biologists interested in doing more documentation and another overseas program in the works. One of the challenges ahead is to try to develop a more general purpose web site to support these kinds of activities.

Digital Initiatives at the Liberal Arts College: One Year On

About a year ago, I wrote a piece on synthesize-specialize-mobilize about our efforts at Lewis & Clark to develop a digital initiatives program. Since then the number of projects in our portfolio has expanded significantly and I think we are building momentum towards a solid and sustainable program. We have a library-led project with a regional interest and appeal in our poetry program (Oregon Poetic Voices), a faculty driven NEH sponsored digital project (Rabat Geneziah), a couple student-oriented projects around spiders and graffiti, and a number of "consulting" style projects in which we've provided advice, expertise and assistance but that are really externally managed by faculty. Coincidentally, we just had a nice piece about our digital initiatives program come out in our alumni magazine.

"Digital initiatives" is a somewhat imprecise label for a variety of different activities and programs that academic libraries pursue in relation to digital collections and digital scholarship. I like to make a distinction between the service-oriented approach to digital initiatives and the project-oriented approach, though there is plenty of fuzzy area between the two. Some organizations focus on a set of fairly well defined services around particular types of digital objects. See, for example Oregon State University's Center for Digital Scholarship and Services, which offers support for digitization, electronic publishing in the journal and monograph forms, and institutional repository services. Other digital initiatives units are more oriented around projects with a less precise focus on specific services. Brown University's Center for Digital Scholarship falls into this category, with a focus on providing support for thematic digital projects.

As I indicated in the post a year ago, I believe that the project oriented approach is the more fertile area for a few different reasons. First, some of these more transactionally oriented digital services such as digitization or scholarly repository provision may be more effectively handled by organizations that transcend the single college or university. Digitization can be outsourced and disciplinary scholarly repositories are often more effective than institutional ones (think of arXiv). Digital projects offer the opportunity to engage in a live scholarly project that may be focused on teaching, research or both. Furthermore, projects can offer the opportunity to leverage local expertise to move them forward: existing working relationships with faculty, connections to students who may contribute to the project, ties to a local technology infrastructure.

Perhaps the most compelling reason to focus on thematic digital projects is that there is more passion around them. We have an archive of electronic student theses that we've been diligently working to populate over the years. It is a useful, worthwhile project, one that students and faculty appreciate and we've got big ambitions to expand it to include multimedia. It's built much like our library collection through acquisition of items across subject areas. But there is limited passion around this project because it is simultaneously about everything and nothing.

If I look at our digital projects, however, every one of them is been borne of creative or intellectual passion, and often project usage stats on Google Analytics demonstrate that this passion is contagious. Doug Erickson, the founder Oregon Poetic Voices, has been traveling around Oregon to capture poetry readings in all sorts of obscure places and build out this archive. He lives and breathes this project. This applies absolutely to the other projects leaders as well: Ted Vogel and accessCeramics, Oren Kosansky and the Rabat Geneziah, Greta Binford and Spiders, Margo Ballantyne and Graffiti, Paul Merchant and the William Stafford Archives.

These types of projects demonstrate how scholarship intersects with sophisticated ways of organizing, presenting and analyzing information. Academic libraries, for the most part, rely on content vendors like JSTOR to construct libraries of the kinds of published material they used to organize on their shelves. We need to spend less and less time building our own library and instead shift our focus towards creating specialized digital libraries that advance teaching and research. This role is increasingly being labeled support for digital scholarship. For example, Brown recently renamed their Center for Digital Initiatives the Center for Digital Scholarship and Rice did the same. Recent large foundation grants to liberal arts colleges such as Mellon's grants to Hamilton, Occidental and the Five Colleges of Ohio focus on digital scholarship and digital humanities and retooling the library to support such endeavors.

Last winter we worked with our Sponsored Research Office to host a faculty workshop on digital scholarship. Digital scholarship and digital humanities are big buzzwords these days and we sought to capture some of that momentum. Despite the lure of THATCamps and great NYT's pieces on "Humanities 2.0" I do worry that some faculty might get scared away by these terms. At some schools, there are faculty who self identify as digital humanists but I don't think we have any like that here. In our case, the most promising approach has been to tap into their scholarly interests and passions and demonstrate what new possibilities that the digital can open up.

It remains to be seen how much our digital initiatives program can grow. As we recruit faculty to join the fold, I would say there is a spectrum of interest levels. Some scholars have a fleshed out idea about where they would like to go, and they are ready to put time and energy into the project to get it going. They may or may not need our help and resources. Other faculty have ideas, but they are more loosely formed, distant aspirations. Completion of tenure files and other more pressing priorities stand in the way. Other scholars may not have any specific ideas, but they are observing a flurry of activities in their own disciplines around digital resources and have an interest in keeping aware of what's going on. Ideas of their own may be germinating.

How do we move those that aren't quite ready to begin projects towards that stage? How do we bring faculty without an interest into the fold? Grants provide a strong incentive: the financial resources and the prestige attached can be a compelling motivator. Most of our projects have some degree of external funding. Finding opportunities to demonstrate the possibilities out there to faculty, including the grants and projects colleagues have been successful with can also help. Our workshop was an opportunity to do this. Above all, finding a way to demonstrate that a particular project can really advance a particular interest or passion is the best motivator.

And what about the perils of success? How do we handle it when we demand for digital scholarly support outstrips our ability to supply that support from our office. We have not developed a formal system for prioritizing projects yet but one could be envisioned that would take into consideration factors such as time commitment, research impact, scholarly impact, cost, etc. Most of our projects have as of now focused on creating a collection that in an of itself serves as a learning and/or research resource. The most compelling projects in a liberal arts setting, however are those that engage students in their creation.

As we seek outside funding for projects, we need to consider ways to provide elastic support mechanisms when large waves of projects, ideally with some level of external support, come our way. Perhaps this means developing relationships with some outside contractors, who can step in to provide expertise when needed. We have some experience with external web development expertise, and we've brought in external help in visual resources.

A bigger question relates to the expertise that makes sense to source locally versus externally. In redefining library services and expertise in our current environment, it is always worth pushing on this question. Project initiation and management done locally can help get projects off the ground with a low barrier to entry. Local project managers can tap into trusted networks of people and resources to move a project forward and sustain it in a stable fashion. They can organize a fundraising strategy that makes sense for the local environment, and orient the project in a way that elevates the institution. Design and technology done locally can tap into existing infrastructure that may get the project off the ground faster and allow it to be maintained over the long term. Projects can be a vehicle for bridging interdisciplinary boundaries at or even between institutions.

At the same time, there are real possibilities for more external models of support and I think the trend is in this direction. There is the cloud-based DIY approach. We've sent a few faculty to Omeka.net to run with projects on there own and this is working pretty well. There is the external contractor approach. Sometimes I wonder if giving faculty easy access to very specialized expertise on demand, say a GIS specialist or a web developer would be a good way to catalyze innovative projects. Also, tapping into digital projects done at other institutions seems like a natural approach for some projects, Furman University's participation in the Homer Multitext project being a nice example of this.

What would define success for a digital initiatives program at a small liberal arts college? Perhaps, if we advance scholarship and or teaching for 5% of the College's faculty and 10% of our students in a given year, that would achieve a significant and relatively broad impact on students as well as advancing faculty research and creative agendas. Should those numbers be higher or lower? In theory, the experiences that the projects offer to students and faculty could have a spillover effect into other scholarly endeavors with which we are not directly affiliated. Digital initiatives fit in with the larger portfolio of academic support we provide including traditional reference and instruction, collection development, and work with special collections so they might also be seen and justified as a part of this larger package.

From this interim director post, one of the things I strive to articulate is the entire spectrum of research and teaching support we provide, from assisting students with basic research questions, to designing assignments with faculty, to building innovative digital projects, to putting students in touch with unique archival documents. It's a humbling and exciting adventure and I will continue to provide updates on this blog.

libraries, sciences, and spiders

At the NITLE Summit session on library collections earlier this month, I advanced the idea that on liberal arts campuses, libraries might reorient themselves to provide more support for the humanities and social sciences while consciously putting less resources into support for the sciences. Ithaka studies have shown that though scientists value the online resources that libraries provide, they are less attached to the library as place and as an intermediary in the research process. Perhaps we should concede the scientists aren't as interested in the library, and concentrate on our role as a laboratory for the humanities and social sciences.

This idea was met with some consternation by many of the library directors in the room that have productive, valuable programs in place with the sciences on their campuses.

Well, I'm happy to report on an example from our campus that perhaps somewhat counters the notion that we should scale down our connection to the sciences. Last year, as we explored ways that our digital initiatives program could grow and support more academic areas, we talked to a few scientists on campus. We were suspecting that they might need help with data management. In a couple of the conversations, however, we heard about the need to educate broader audiences as an aspect of NSF grant projects. There was interest in the library's ability to get some of their research data out on the web and make it accessible in new ways.

Our first foray into this type of project involved Biologist Greta Binford, a scholar famous for her work with venomous spiders. This fall, in her introductory "Perspectives in Biology" course, Greta had her students collect, identify, and photograph spiders in the immediate vicinity of our campus. Our digital initiatives crew, chiefly Jeremy McWilliams, worked with the students to upload images of spiders, descriptive metadata, and genetic sequences to Flickr. Jeremy and Anneliese Dehner then did some web programming and design magic to pull together the work of the students into a website, The Spiders of Lewis & Clark. It even pulls in data and images from the Encylclopedia of Life API.

This project is a great example of a digital project that really involves students in its creation and pulls in data from the participatory web. It was gratifying to see the Encyclopedia of Life list us on their homepage after we contacted them about our use of their data. I think its clearly a first for us to make the homepage of one of the reference sources that we list in our research guides. And its particularly fitting because Encyclopedia of Life is a modern reference source built in an open, participatory, decentralized way from numerous information sources.

I'll bring this back to my previous post, and cite this as an example of students getting experience doing work, specifically scientific inquiry, that prepares them to work at the edge of knowledge creation. In this case the library brings the expertise required to organize and present this knowledge. In a sense the project goes beyond referring to information sources to create an information source of its own.

digital initiating

Jeff Leonard is Lewis & Clark's sole instructor in Electronic Music. Last week, Watzek Digital Services Coordinator Jeremy McWilliams and I met him in his studio, a tiny dark triangular room with three iMacs in it that is often packed with students because of the popularity of his courses. Jeff told us about his student projects and his ambitions to archive the best of them and we bounced around some ideas for creating a site that would do that.

He observed that students in the last few years are much more aware of copyright law and the whole concept of appropriating content. They know about creative commons licensing and some even know who Lawrence Lessig is. He showed us this student project, which is somewhat emblematic of that trend.

Yesterday Jeremy and Visual Resources Coordinator Stephanie Beene and I had lunch with Garrick Imatani, our Foundations professor in the Art department. Garrick's ideas for digital projects include a site that would support digital means of delivering art work, kind of like this one; pairing up a group of students with a parallel group in another part of the world to do an art project using a division of labor that would mirror and perhaps invert the one we see in current global trade; and building a website that would act as an exchange, archive, and curriculum generator for the emerging genre of Social Practice art.

These are just a few of the ideas that have been bubbling up following our digital scholarship workshop. Indeed, the most rewarding part of doing library digital initiatives is the opportunity to tap into the creative intellectual energy that abounds within a campus environment. We look forward to some of these initial meetings leading to future collaborative digital projects with the library.

what winter break?

As interim director, I was particularly relishing the prospect of winter break: a week and a half uninterrupted by any workplace distractions. My family took a vacation in Bend to get off the wet streets of Portland and into some real winter. Skiing, sledding, brewpubs and a hot tub all was part of the package. It was a great getaway, though I must say that introducing a 2 1/2 year old to winter sports with all the requisite gear is quite a handful. He liked the hot tub though. On my last day there, there was just enough time before check out for me and our dog Charlie to drive up to Wanoga Snopark and skate ski a couple laps with a breathtaking sunrise out over eastern Oregon as a backdrop. Since then, it's been back to reality.

That reality has involved two sizable projects both of which were due on January 13th. The first one was to come up with a report that identifies strengths, challenges, and potential future directions for our beloved Watzek for our faculty library/educational technology committee. This report was intended to inform our faculty and administration of possibilities for the library in light of the interim director situation in which we find ourselves in. Looking back over ten years was an interesting exercise and I hope to share more of it.

The second project was a digital scholarship workshop for faculty at Lewis & Clark. The library has been building a portfolio of digital projects, many faculty driven. I blogged about this phenomenon last spring. Our sponsored research officer and I put together this two hour session to bring new faculty into the fold and gauge interest in a bigger campus initiative around digital scholarship as we have seen at places like Hamilton and Occidental. We held the workshop on January 13th with something like 20 faculty (representing at least 12 academic disciplines in humanities and social sciences) and 9 academic staff on hand. Not bad for our little college.

There are other things on my mind as well, but these two initiatives have jump started my year.
Happy 2011.

spider lab

Last spring I visited with multiple faculty across the College of Arts and Sciences about ways that the library could help them organize data better for teaching and research. One of our most receptive folks was Greta Binford of Biology. Yesterday I stopped by and visited a Biology 100 lab filled with students busily photographing spiders with microscopes, uploading them to Flickr, and then tagging them using flickr machine tags. Digital Services Coordinator Jeremy McWilliams has worked with Greta to come up with a system for classifying and geotagging these spiders, which have all been retrieved from the Lewis & Clark campus. The result will be a website that will map the "spiders of lewis & clark."

This is our first digital initiative in the sciences, and we look forward to more down the line.