Zoe Borovsky, Chair
Giovanni Colavizza (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands)
Silvio Peroni (University of Bologna, Italy)
Matteo Romanello (École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland)
Short abstract:
We propose and exemplify motivations and design requirements for a humanities citation index. We suggest ways to make the index collaborative, distributed and open.
Long abstract:
Citation indexes are by now part of the research infrastructure in use by most scientists: a necessary tool in order to cope with increasing amounts of scientific literature being published. Commercial citation indexes are designed for the sciences and have uneven coverage and unsatisfactory characteristics for scholars in the humanities, while no broad-coverage citation index is proposed by a public organization. We argue that a citation index for the humanities is desirable, for four reasons: it would greatly improve the retrieval of sources, it would offer a way to interlink collections across repositories (such as archives and libraries), it would foster the adoption of metadata standards and best practices by all relevant actors (including libraries and publishers) and it would contribute data to fields such as bibliometrics and science studies. We also suggest that this citation index must be informed by a set of requirements relevant to the humanities, including comprehensive source coverage and substantial chronological depth. To substantiate our proposal, we showcase two infrastructure components of the envisaged humanities citation index: a prototype online application including a digital library and citation index for the historiography on Venice (named Venice Scholar), and two open linked data citation repositories made available by OpenCitations (i.e. the OpenCitations Corpus and the Crossref corpus COCI). The Venice Scholar digital library allows operators to curate machine-extracted citation data, which will then be federated by OpenCitations into its persistent triplestores of citation data. These citation data can be pulled and served via the Venice Scholar citation index: an open online application. We conclude by proposing that the humanities citation index should be created taking a collaborative, distributed and open effort, as made possible by the proposed infrastructure: taking inspiration from library catalogs and in collaboration with GLAM institutions, primarily libraries.
Eric Shows (New York Public Library, United States)
Sara Rubinow (New York Public Library, United States)
Matt Knutzen (New York Public Library, United States)
Short abstract:
We’ll explore how transforming collections into a digital form can multiply research impact and how partnering with research communities can influence the library’s Digital Collections strategy.
Long abstract:
To further increase the discoverability, access, and use of the New York Public Library’s collections, digitization offers our patrons manifold possibilities for research and a deep dive into the Library’s encyclopedic holdings. Over the past decade, we have established clear rationales, processes, and workflows for digitizing research collections at the New York Public Library and are dedicated to building partnerships to explore how transforming collections into a digital form can multiply research impact.
In this presentation, we’ll take a closer look at the complete digitization life cycle for a single collection, from direct patron request and conversations with curators to online publishing, museum exhibition, and structured data extraction. To surface this largely invisible work, we’ll discuss the roles that the Library’s Digital Imaging Unit, Metadata Services Unit, Registrar’s Office, and Rights teams play in that life cycle. Along the way, we’ll look at the opportunities for scholarship that arise when research materials have been digitized and become available online through our digital portals.
We’ll discuss recent successes that aid genealogical research and our understanding of the urban landscape, experiments in computer vision to develop new ways of seeing and organizing items in a collection, and the latent potential in some recently digitized collections and corresponding research implications. We’ll also discuss how feedback from researchers about the rising baseline expectations around collections as data has begun to influence how we prioritize digitization projects and how we think about partnering with the scholarly community.
Zach Coble (New York University Libraries, United States)
Short abstract:
This talk will discuss the recent evolution and alignment of digital humanities support, services, and infrastructure at NYU, in particular infrastructure building collaborations between Libraries and IT.
Long abstract:
This talk will discuss the recent evolution and alignment of digital humanities activities at NYU Libraries. While the Digital Scholarship Services (DSS) department is the public face of digital humanities at the library, our support, services, and infrastructure increasingly rely on collaborations between several departments across Libraries and IT.
For context, the scalable and sustainable approach to digital humanities in libraries, developed by DSS co-founders Jennifer Vinopal and Monica McCormick over seven years ago, has continued to guide our growth as we have adapted our approach to meet new needs. One of the core practices of this approach is to not embed ourselves in long-term projects that inevitably sink staff time and resources into maintaining projects that scholars gradually lose interest in. Instead, we provide training, services, and infrastructure that empower scholars to create, publish, and preserve their work. More recently, we have focused on empowering users by developing technical infrastructure that meets their unique needs, which is the result of taking a broad look and identifying similarities in the computational needs among DHers and scholars in other disciplines.
One aspect of this I will briefly touch on is our success in solving the “faculty website problem” using Reclaim Hosting’s Domain of One’s Own service. But perhaps more interesting is our work taking place under the umbrella of “Digital Repository Services for Researchers” (DRSR) This multi-phase project is a collaboration between several Libraries departments and the Research Technology group in Central IT to build and develop a robust suite of repository services that meet user’s complex needs at each stage of the research lifecycle, including discovery, access, publication, and preservation. For example, we have recently launched Research Workspace, a repository service providing fast, reliable, mountable storage for management of large-scale research data. Our Collections as Data work now lives on Research Workspace, and these collections can be easily mounted to a researcher’s laptop or NYU’s high performance computing cluster for analysis.
This talk will outline NYU Libraries’ current iteration of sustainable and scalable services, with a focus on the goals of our DRSR work. I will also provide use cases to describe in practical terms how NYU’s DH community has benefited from this work.
Jesko Reiling (Zentralbibliothek Zürich, Switzerland)
Short abstract:
Der Beitrag erläutert die organisatorischen und finanziellen Aufwendungen, welche die Zentralbibliothek Zürich aufbringen muss(te), um sich (längerfristig) als Forschungsbibliothek etablieren zu können.
Long abstract:
Die Zentralbibliothek Zürich (ZB) unterstützt seit einigen Jahren universitäre Forschungsprojekte und ist 2018 erstmals eine Forschungskooperation mit einem Editionsprojekt eingegangen. Zusammen mit dem Editionsteam der Johann Caspar Lavater (1740-1801) Briefausgabe erarbeitet sie seither für die online-Briefedition (lavater.com) Metadaten und produziert zudem rund 110’000 Digitalisate der Korrespondenz. Dafür zahlt sie einen hohen Preis, der im Referat eingehender und aus verschiedenen Blickwinkeln zur Sprache kommen soll.
Der Beitrag illustriert anhand des Lavater-Pilotprojekts die Herausforderungen für eine Bibliothek, wenn sie sich als Forschungspartnerin aufstellen will. Vorgestellt werden die erforderlichen Ressourcen, die notwendigen organisatorischen Entwicklungsmassnahmen sowie betriebswirtschaftliche Mittel, die es braucht, um ein Einzelprojekt abzuwickeln und sich darüber hinaus längerfristig als Forschungspartnerin zu etablieren. Die Erfahrung zeigt, dass es eminent wichtig ist, die institutionellen Prozesse und Workflows ebenso umfassend wie detailliert zu identifizieren. So braucht es z.B. nicht nur Fachpersonal für die Erschliessung und das Scannen der Briefe, darüber hinaus mussten auch weitgehende restauratorische Massnahmen ergriffen werden, um die Digitalisierung des Materials überhaupt erst zu ermöglichen. Im Weiteren mussten auch technische Entwicklungen veranlasst werden, um der Edition den Datenimport auf die gewünschte Art und Weise zu ermöglichen.
Trotz Forschungsgelder durch den Schweizerischen Nationalfonds (SNF), dem nationalen Förderer universitärer Forschung, muss die ZB den Grossteil der Kosten selber bestreiten. Das Referat zeigt die enorme Kluft zwischen den gesprochenen und den benötigten Geldern detailliert auf. Hier stellt sich diejenige Frage, die wohl alle Bibliotheken beschäftigt: Bis zu welchem Preis kann man als Bibliothek (längerfristig) Forschungspartnerschaften eingehen?
Dabei gilt es freilich auch die Vorteile von Forschungskooperationen zu bedenken: durch Forschungsgelder eröffnen sich GLAM-Institutionen zusätzliche Möglichkeiten der Erschliessung: Es können weitere, bislang unerschlossene Bestände aufgearbeitet werden oder man kann einen Bestand noch genauer und vertiefter erschliessen. Als Forschungspartnerin kommt man als Bibliothek dem eigenen institutionellen Sammlungs-, Erschliessungs- und Vermittlungsauftrag nach. Zudem trägt jedes Forschungsprojekt dazu bei, den eigenen Bestand sichtbarer zu machen. Das kann schlussendlich zu weiteren Folgeprojekten führen.
Die ZB, davon soll abschliessend die Rede sein, entwickelt(e) deshalb (erstmals in ihrer Geschichte) eine Forschungsstrategie. Ein Teil davon ist es, zusätzliches (geisteswissenschaftlich und bibliothekarisch geschultes, aber auch technisch ausgebildetes) Fachpersonal einzustellen. Diese Mitarbeitende sollen nicht mehr, wie bis anhin, lediglich in einer Fachabteilung (Handschriften, Alte Drucke, Graphik oder Karten etc.) tätig sein, sondern arbeiten als ‘Universalisten’ fachbereichsübergreifend in zukünftigen Forschungsprojekten und -kooperationen mit. Mit diesen neuen Strukturen will sich die ZB als zuverlässige und effiziente Forschungspartnerin profilieren.
Tuula Pääkkönen (National Library of Finland)
Jussi-Pekka Hakkarainen (National Library of Finland)
Short abstract:
This talk tells about the researcher services evolution in National Library of Finland (data clinics, data catalogue and presentation system features), now and in the future.
Long abstract:
In the National Library of Finland, there is constant attempt to facilitate discussion with researchers in many ways. In the annual summit of the Helsinki Centre of Digital Humanities the opening words of the new approach towards the researcher user segment (Lilja and Hakkarainen 2018), was a welcomed step by the researcher community. The communication approach of the National Library vary in size. There are 1-on-1 meetings, small group events in so called “morning coffee” sessions where researchers can present their work and how they utilize the collections. Then recently there has been data-clinics, where in an on-site workshops, where the programmatic ways how to utilize the data from the collections are explained. In this talk, we approach the research questions, what kind of documentation different researchers would need from the content, presentation systems and techniques? Are the end-user documentation (screen casts, basic user guides) enough also for the researchers, or is there need for more?
Recently we created an initial version of the instructions on how to utilize the collections on their own, i.e. self-help instructions on how to download desired parts of the collections or metadata. This is a local experiment bit similar to the Programming Historian (PH 2019). Our focus has been to answer to the most common questions of the researchers and enable them to help them to help themselves. While doing this toolset we realized, that the contextual bubble within the library differs from that of the researchers of themselves. We need to benchmark good practices to overcome the possible technological barriers researchers might face (Zhang, Liu, and Mathews 2015) and evaluate the strategy of the future.
Discussion with the researchers in the data-clinics has turned out to be very effective. The data-clinics, as a face-to-face meeting, lowers the communication threshold. We need to learn new ways for the cross-institutional collaboration (Nyhan and Fay 2015) and embrace the collaborative nature of the digital humanities (Wong 2016) in different lifecycle phases of the library service creation. We need to investigate further the expectations for the National Library and towards our contact points in other organizations – together we could weave a network where each organization can provide some aspect to bring a more coherent whole. In the long run, this helps the researches, which helps in the increasing the societal impact of the collections.
References
Lilja, Johanna, and Jussi-Pekka Hakkarainen. 2018. ‘Re-Defining Our Services - National Library’s New Initiatives to Support Open Science’. In Helsinki.
Nyhan, Julianne, and Ed Fay. 2015. ‘Webbs on the Web: Libraries, Digital Humanities and Collaboration’. Library Review 64(1/2): 118–34.
PH. 2019. ‘The Programming Historian’. Programming Historian. https://programminghistorian.org/ (April 20, 2019).
Wong, Shun Han Rebekah. 2016. ‘Digital Humanities: What Can Libraries Offer?’ portal: Libraries and the Academy 16(4): 669–90.
Zhang, Ying, Shu Liu, and Emilee Mathews. 2015. ‘Convergence of Digital Humanities and Digital Libraries’. Library Management; Bradford 36(4/5): 362–77.
Martijn Kleppe (KB National Library of the Netherlands)
Steven Claeyssens (KB National Library of the Netherlands)
Sara Veldhoen (KB National Library of the Netherlands)
Lotte Wilms (KB National Library of the Netherlands)
Short abstract:
This paper presents how the KB collaborates with researchers in various forms to better serve their needs but also to improve our own services.
Long abstract:
The KB National Library of the Netherlands has been actively engaged with digital humanities through collaborations with academia. This paper present how the KB is partnering with the research community on digital humanities projects using the more than 100 million digitised pages of printed text. Since our digitisation started in the 1990s our focus shifted from the physical to the digital collection. We actively search for partners in the research community to use and study our digitised materials, with support from research software engineers in the digital humanities team of the KB.
Of course, collaboration is easier when access to the data is easy. This is why in 2013 a data services coordinator was installed in the library. Providing researchers with a single contact person to get access to the APIs and how to work with them facilitates use of the collections.
We aim to collaborate with researchers in different stages in their career. Since 2004, we have had the KB/NIAS Fellowship (kb.nl/en/organisation/kb-fellowship). This fellowship programme went from a programme for foreign researchers focused on the physical collections (2004-2013) to a national fellowship for professors working in the digital humanities (2014-2018) who were invited to spend a research sabbatical in the library for 5 months.
A similar programme was launched in 2014, aimed at early-career researchers: the funded researcher-in-residence programme (kb.nl/en/organisation/research-expertise/researcher-in-residence), which works with a yearly call for proposals. Two researchers are selected by a committee of scholars from various disciplines and two library representatives. They spend 6 months working part-time in the Research department, together with the DH team. All output is published on the KB Lab (lab.kb.nl).
Through the years we have built up a network of researchers through these forms of collaboration. We found that they are often looking for real world cases for their students to work on, as theses or research projects. We regularly have interns in the Research department or provide data and cases to students working on a project assignment.
Another type of collaboration that we have pursued recently aims to obtain input from several researchers at a time for a specific case that we formulate. For instance in the ICT with Industry workshop (ict-research.nl/ict-with-industry/ictwi2019/#case1), organised by the ICT-research Platform Netherlands, where a team of researchers spend a full week working on a problem put before them by industry. We are also trying out this approach by providing data to benchmarking contests, such as DMAS (primaresearch.org/DMAS2019/). Asking for input from researchers to help solve issues we have in the library means we get a broad view of possible solutions while also contributing to the scholarly community with research topics with practical applications.
This paper will present the various forms of collaboration described above, and will go into more detail about lessons learned and recommendations for collaboration with researchers as a library.