How can collection stewards create and serve computationally-accessible collections as data? How can teachers, researchers, journalists, curators, and others who rely on collections as data find and access this data, and communicate their needs? How can collections as data move beyond large and well-resourced institutions and implementations? The Always Already Computational: Collections as Data project, which ran 2016-2018 with generous support from the Institute of Museum and Library Services’ National Digital Platform grant program, sought to address these - and other - questions while documenting and sharing current and potential approaches to collections as data. Always Already Computational convened two national forums, organized multiple workshops, shared project outcomes in professional conferences, sought broad feedback, and generated a framework comprising nearly a dozen publications meant to guide institutions. In this presentation, Always Already Computational project team member Sarah Potvin will situate and summarize the project’s activities and framework, reflect on its critical emphasis on ‘community’ and ‘computing,’ and invite discussion of persistent questions for collections as data.
Bio: Sarah Potvin is an Associate Professor in the Texas A&M University Libraries. As the Digital Scholarship Librarian, based in the Office of Scholarly Communication, she has experience coordinating a portfolio of digital humanities, digital collection, and library technology projects, with attention to platforms, standards, varieties of open access, and interoperability. At Texas A&M, she has contributed as a core project team member, with Amy Earhart, Rebecca Hankins, and Maura Ives, to the collaborative, interdisciplinary Digital Black Bibliographies (DiBB) project, which seeks to transform bibliographies into data and visualize the literary contributions of African Americans from the 1950s to the 1980s through the prism of two bibliographers’ works, and to the Texas A&M node of the multi-institutional NSF-funded Open Explorations of Vertebrate Diversity in 3D project (OVert). Her current assignments emphasize a post-custodial approach to digital scholarship that extends the principles and practices of stewardship to collections outside of libraries’ custody. Ms. Potvin recently concluded work as a project team member and co-Investigator on the IMLS-sponsored Always Already Computational: Collections as Data project (2016-2018). She is a founding editor of dh+lib and a founding convener of the Libraries and Digital Humanities Special Interest Group of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations. Her research and service work is primarily focused on digital humanities, the politics and complexities of public and open access, and community engagement.