North Carolina Digital Collections Collaboratory

This messy, difficult thing is called innovation, and while it can cause angst for those who prefer stable dysfunctionality, it does make the Library ecosystem a richer and more diverse place. – Mark Leggott, LoomWare

Lately I’ve been feeling that work is especially messy and difficult, so I appreciated this quote from Mark Leggott (in response to the Stephen Abrams/SirsiDynix dust-up) that characterized such work as “innovation” and a breath of fresh air compared to “stable dysfunctionality.”

If I begin to think of innovation as something that is by its very nature messy and difficult I gain a new perspective on the work that is being carried out by myself and my colleagues. While it’s great when you can find solutions to real world problems and can experiment with and learn from multiple solutions, there is also the very real issue of each new project’s cascading effect on other services. I feel like as soon as we implement something, even if it’s the most elegant thing we ever saw, we launch a second phase of cleaning up everything else to work with the new paradigm. Is this a failing on my part in leadership, or a necessary evil of innovation? Read more »

What’s in my bag, LITA Forum 2009 by flickr user vacekrae.

I can’t believe it’s actually been more than 3 weeks since I attended the 2009 LITA National Forum (if you are a member of ALA Connect (which is free) you can also download all the presenter’s materials). This is my fourth year attending the Forum, and I think it was by far the best I’ve been to. Full disclosure: I was on the planning committee…but I think my enjoyment was due in large part to the fact that I knew so many colleagues this time around. Over the last four years I’ve tried to put more into my participation in the organization and the Forum in order to get more out of it, and it’s paid off.

That’s not to say that there weren’t some really great sessions though. This year, the sessions that stick most in my memory were the keynotes by David Weinberger (author of Everything is Miscellaneous…which I always describe as the perfect, non-threatening way to describe metadata (and in large part, my job) to my parents) and Liz Lawley of the Lab for Social Computing at the University of Rochester. Both explored the immersive nature of technology, how it is changing the way we think, the things we can do, the things we want to do. Along with the third keynote by Joan Lipincott of the Coalition for Networked Infrastructure, the general theme of the conference, “Open and Mobile,” was thoroughly investigated. (I urge you to download and listen to the general session podcasts at http://litablog.org/).

While the “open” end of things is something that I think about quite a bit (open-source, open access, open archives,…the list goes on), “mobile” is probably not on my mind as much as it should be. Read more »

Since the beginning of this Collaboratory I have been relatively quiet. In part because not much seemed to be happening here at UNC Charlotte that felt relevant to toss into the conversation and, probably more so, because what was being worked on was pulling me in so many different directions it was hard to get my thoughts straight. To some extent both of these remains true, but it seems like a good time to comment on the ingredients of the “digital stew” that is coming together. –My apologies in advance for how ridiculously long this blog post is (and for the stew analogy).

The first two items seem intensely non-digital but they are the base for the stew.

New Leadership – Aug. 1 brought Stanley Wilder, our new University Librarian. Over the course of the last couple of months, Stanley has been giving a good look at Atkins Library digital presence and has begun to set us on a path of improvement, redesigning, restructuring, rethinking, re-imagining…things are just getting started, so stay tuned for follow up.

Anthropologist in the Library and Archives — along these lines Atkins now has a part-time anthropologist on staff who will begin to help us with user studies (of both physical and digital spaces) based on ethnographic designs. This piece began last week, so I don’t any comments right now but I am excited about an interdisciplinary approach to understanding how students, faculty, researchers interact with our digital environment(s).

Recruiting a Digital Programs Archivist — as a part of our re-thinking, etc. and given the current availability of position funding, we have decided to momentarily delay the recruitment of an A/V and Oral History Archivist position and instead pursue recruitment of a Digital Programs Archivist position (as of yet not advertised, but I will let everyone know when it opens). This is a major shift for us, signaling not only a continuation/expansion of the digital collections work we have done in the past (like New South Voices) but a concerted effort to build a broader, more formal program in digital preservation and program development. I am putting together the job description and requirements right now. It seems most important to me that the position emphasize an archival perspective on technology and a firm ability to manage workflows and communicate/collaborate with a broad constituency of “technologists” in the library, around the campus, and across the state….but all of this is in its infancy, so again, stay tuned.

Digital Humanities at UNC Charlotte — given limited financial and human resources, communication/collaboration with a broad constituency of “technologists” and with scholars is feeling like the way to go – even in our basic development of digital collections. I spent Friday in a symposium on digital humanities sponsored by our Center for Humanities, Technology, and Science (a center formed within the last couple of years). What I walked away with is an overwhelming sense of the need to be far more proactive in identifying scholar partners on campus with whom we can collaborate broadly to develop new digital collections employing new technologies for new kinds of humanistic studies. Clear as mud, right? OK, an example of this would be recent conversations I’ve had with a linguist on campus about evolving New South Voices into its next phase, which would include, among other things, more robust tools for linguistic analysis (thereby supporting her research and that of others). To take it a step further, it seems logical to take the idea to our Visualization Center and see where collaboration might benefit us all…and then maybe finding a partner in our Center for Applied Geographic Information Science . The possibilities are endless and potentially super complicated but I like this idea of getting some piece of our digital collections development out of our exclusive hands — of being a partner at the table that provides “the stuff” and a few levels of expertise that can collaborate with folks who can tell us how “the stuff” could “best” be used for research and with folks who have the technical expertise to take it way beyond what we’re capable of. In a way, it all seems so obvious but we have spent so much time partnering on a small scale or imagining our projects in a relative vacuum that this is also a game changing approach for us.

These are just a few of the larger pieces of the “digital stew” we’ve got cooking here at UNC Charlotte. I’ve rambled on enough for right now –perhaps proof I should be a more consistent contributor of smaller bits of information — but there are any number of questions that come up as I think about all of this and where it may take us.

Over the past few weeks,  I’ve been doing a lot of revision to our digital collections proposal process at Duke. Over the last decade, our digitization efforts were project-focused. Library staff looked for meaningful themes and connections between our primary source collections and digitized to demonstrate those connections.  Through this approach we developed some of our most popular, flagship collections, such as Ad*Access,  Historic American Sheet Music, and others, and we continue to build on this solid foundation with our digitization today.

In order to transition to large-scale digitization, however, I’d like to re-engineer our approach so that the discovery of these meaningful connections between our primary sources happens AFTER digitization, not before. We hope to shift digitization from these small-scale, project-focused collections to digitization of entire archival collections or entire series, whenever possible.

One issue we’re having with this switch is that the very first step, our current proposal process for selecting and prioritizing digitization projects, was built to support the small-scale, interpretive approach, rather than the large-scale, comprehensive approach. My revision work over the past few weeks has been to transition from our existing project proposal process to what I’ve been calling a collection nomination process. I thought it would be useful to get feedback from Collaboratory readers.

Read more »

Are you going to be in Greenville for the NCLA conference October 8th? Are you interested in meeting other like-minded librarians, archivists, and digital library practitioners? Do you like beer or at least places that serve beer among other things?

Then join us for the Collaboratory Happy Hour at Ham’s Restaurant and Brew House on Thursday October 8th at 6:30.  Email me if you have any questions.

Additional recent examples of seeking public input/advice for digital projects/collections:

• Duke Digital Collections asking for input on the redesign of their web interface (no comments yet; let’s get going!)
• UNC Libraries’ request for feedback on the newly-launched Hugh Morton digital collection in CONTENTdm

And yes, this is a sneaky way for me to publicize the Morton digital library….

I just finished an interesting article on how Canadian archives are handling copyright (suggested in Roy Tennant’s Current Cites for August).

The article by Jean Dryden, entitled “Copyright issues in the selection of archival material for internet access” was published in Archival Science last June (here is a link, although the article will only be accessible if you have a subscription). Through policy review, questionnaires and interviews with 106 institutions, the author evaluates how restrictive an archives’ digitization selection is due to copyright concerns. Read more »

It’s been interesting to me to see how this blog has developed. I’m happy to see that the content of posts has been pretty wide-ranging, which is exactly why we tried to invite so many “collaborators.” I often see your posts on different topics and think my own seem to be about a lot of administrata…which makes perfect sense actually since the thing that causes the most sleepless nights for me is how to orchestrate the whole damned thing (i.e. Digital Collections). I mean I’ve always been kind of bossy, but it’s a different thing to actually be the boss! (I also seem to write the longest posts…I always have been a bit chatty.)

So here comes another one. I’ve been interested since I started at ECU in doing some research on how “digital” units in libraries are organized, what their goals are, and how they communicate that with the rest of the library. It might be a sign of neurosis on my own part, but I am interested in how the organization as a whole affects how digital initiatives are formed and what type of work they do.

Stating it like that, it sounds ridiculously obvious, right? — the way the organization works affects how digital units within them work. But I think there are particular difficulties with digital units because they are “new” and not uniformly defined. I’m sure it is true that most units in the library are concerned with how they interact with other units in the library. But we have the added difficulty of building the plane while we’re flying it, and that can make the task of trying to communicate what you are doing and why you are doing it that much harder. Read more »

While I wouldn’t exactly call myself browser agnostic, I don’t hold any firm beliefs that one browser is better than all others. Well, let me restate that. I only hold firm that all browsers are equally better than Internet Explorer. If you’ve done any web development, you know what I’m talking about here. How much extra time and energy have you expended, and how many deep-breathing techniques and other frustration-reducing activities have you had to adopt to get that CSS to work correctly in both IE and [fill-in-just-about-any-other-browser-name-here]. And, 99.9% of the time, all that heartache is caused by IE.

Apparently, the (short story) is that up until IE 7 (feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, by the way), Microsoft didn’t feel it necessary to ascribe to any sort of HTML-based standards. Most everyone else, basically, did. When they came out with IE 7, they had a huge internal debate – do we suddenly learn to play nice and create a standards-based browser this time, or do we continue down our own, proprietary, non-standardized path? They were “nice enough” to play with the rest of the team and adopt some standards. This is all good, right?

EXCEPT that IE 6 is still OUT THERE. HAUNTING US. TORMENTING US with its non-standards based self. And, A LOT of people are still using it (something like 17-ish percent).

Well, I was glad to see the other day that I’m not alone in my frustrations, and that there are some folks out there trying to do something to rid us of the insane havoc (as if havoc alone wasn’t enough) that IE 6 has wrecked on so many web developers. I give you ie6nomore.com.

Spread the word, people.

Wow. This actually turned into a much more religious tract than I meant for it to be. Ah well. I guess Microsoft will do that to you, sometimes.

Over at North Carolina Miscellany I’m experimenting with a more democratic way of prioritizing materials for digitization. I’m surprised at the amount of responses so far — I think it’s a case of local pride kicking in, though some of this may also be due to lobbying efforts in Forsyth County. Winston-Salem is the clear leader so far, with Hillsborough running second.