LES Blog

A post-by-proxy for our colleague Vince G. at Concordia.

Concordia University in Montreal, Canada has blocked access to Facebook on campus,but it is available on the wireless network. Ostensibly, this was done to limit traffic on the university network, but now that Facebook has become a professional and academic communication tool, as well as an essential tool for students, I believe this prohibition is unwarranted. I am wondering if this practice is widespread (or not). Do you know of any other universities that have blocked campus access to Facebook?

I asked Barbara Chen, the editor of the MLA International Bibliography,  to comment on OCLC’s plan to include the Bibliography’s records in WorldCat Local.  Here is her reply:

When OCLC first approached us with an idea to include the Bibliography in WorldCat Local, I realized that this would be a good opportunity for the MLA to experiment. Both organizations were trying to think in new, creative ways to encourage findability for a range of users. We understand that we may be able to reach more students and scholars by integrating our database into a simple search platform than we would as a standalone file. We are expecting OCLC will remind users where they are finding the most relevant material on language and literature by including our name in their search results screen. Once users recognize the wealth of information the Bibliography holds on their topics of interest, they will want to come back and search us again. It doesn’t matter if the search is performed through WorldCat or in the Bibliography. Users will have an option to either type in a few keywords in a multi-file search or to set their sights on a specific database, browsing indexes and thesauri or even our Directory of Periodicals.

WorldCat Local will be a conduit to information but it will not be the final resting place for data files. Libraries will still need to subscribe through their vendor of choice to be able to access records.

 I understand that WorldCat Local is a work in progress with expected date of introduction for this part of the operation in July 2009. Even though I am not directly involved in its implementation, I look forward to hearing your thoughts on the system. My goal is to improve the Bibliography to the best of my ability, and I can only do that in communication with others.

Sincerely,
Barbara Chen
Director of Bibliographic Information Services
and Editor, MLA International Bibliography
26 Broadway
New York, NY 10004-1789
tel. (646) 576-5076
fax (646) 835-4021
email bchen@mla.org

OK, so I’ve been asked to be a panelist for a session on “Marketing Online Databases” at the MDK12 Digital Library Summit, to be held in mid-June. I will be representing the academic librarian’s viewpoint, and will be joined by a public librarian and a school library district administrator.  I agreed to be a panelist because the commitment is minimal (60 minutes total, so probably 15 minutes of talking plus time for questions) but I have to admit I haven’t thought much about how (if at all) we market our online databases to our customers.

At our university, marketing of the libraries and their resources is done at a more general level; e.g., giving out highlighters and Post-Its with the homepage on them at orientations, etc. I think most of our resource-specific “marketing” is done through our library instruction programs. We rely on the history subject specialist to inform the history students about Historical Abstracts, the English subject specialist to talk about MLA and ABELL, the art librarians to alert the art students to ArtSTOR and Art Abstracts. If a database doesn’t get used, I think most of my colleagues are happy to cancel it and look for something that is worth the cost, rather than spend time and energy marketing a database that no one wants to use.

One idea is to use cross-training of librarians to make sure that patrons will be connected with the most useful databases for their topics. This is especially important in institutions where you have a wide range of subject areas and a large number of electronic resources available. You could use a series of simple”brown bag” workshops (e.g., “Top 5 Databases in the Humanities,” “Digital Resources in the Life Sciences,” etc.) in which librarians train one another on the best databases to use for their subject areas.

What other ideas do you have? What are your experiences with marketing your databases to students and faculty? Do you spend much time thinking about how to get more of your patrons to use MLA, World Shakespeare Bibliography, or other electronic resources?

Last week, three of my colleagues and I presented a workshop as part of a conference held here at UMD called Digital Diasporas: Digital Humanities and African American/African Diaspora Studies. We were invited by conference organizers in the English Department to present a three-hour workshop on “Navigating Digital Resources in African American/African Diaspora Studies,” which we divided up into three main sections: Research Strategies (general info on how to find books, articles and primary documents, databases and web searching tools); Professional Resources (universities, research centers and libraries, professional organizations, and teaching resources); and Digital Resources on Selected Topics. For this last section we chose four representative subject areas: Slavery, The Harlem Renaissance, Women Writers of the Diaspora, and Films and Filmmakers of the Diaspora. The webpage we created is located here: http://www.lib.umd.edu/MCK/Diaspora/index.html.

While resources for Slavery (and, for some extent, the Harlem Renaissance) were plentiful, I have to admit being rather frustrated in my search for high-quality web resources on Women Writers of the Diaspora. There’s the Schomburg’s African American Women Writers of the 19th Century, of course, and Voices from the Gaps, and a handful of resources like the Zora Neale Hurston Plays at the Library of Congress. But beyond that, pickings were mighty slim.

So what are your favorites? Do you have any recommendations for web sites that we missed in this subject area? (Or, for that matter, in any of the other subject areas–slavery, Harlem Renaissance, films & filmmakers?) Maybe you have a project at your institution that would fit with the theme of the workshop? Take a look at the workshop web site and leave your comments on the blog–we’ll happily add your site or project!

I just came back from a lunch-time session sponsored by the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), a research unit housed right here in the main library at UMD, about their latest NEH-funded undertaking, the Shakespeare’s Quartos Project. (You can view the announcement for the talk, or read the University’s official news release.) It’s a pretty exciting pilot grant to “create a technical proof of concept ‘working model’ for the project by digitizing all 32 pre-1641 versions of Hamlet held by [six] participating libraries.” The eventual goal is to create a “freely-accessible, high resolution digital interactive archive of William Shakespeare’s pre-1641 quartos.” Scanning for the project has been under way for a while now, and you may already be familiar with the British Library’s Treasures in Full: Shakespeare in Quarto, which currently has the BL’s 93 copies of pre-1642 quartos, and which will eventually house the completed project.

The talk was part of MITH’s “Digital Dialogues” series, weekly talks on all sorts of interesting electronic issues and projects, usually attended by a mix of arts & humanities and computer science faculty and students. I attend when my schedule allows, but usually I’m the only librarian in the room. All of which got me to wondering… How much do you (as a humanities librarian) pay attention to and/or participate in developments in the realm of “Digital Humanities” (sometimes aka “Humanities Computing”)? If you do pay attention or participate, what are your reasons for doing so? What kinds of things interest you, and how do you keep up?

For now, my primary motivation is to learn about cool projects, like Shakespeare’s Quartos, (or the Dickinson Electronic Archives or the Walt Whitman Archive), that will help me to help my students and faculty. I think that down the road I’d be interested in participating in some sort of digital humanities project or scholarship, but I have yet to figure out how that would occur or what it would look like. As for keeping up, I feel a bit spoiled having a vibrant organization like MITH in-house, as I know there will always be interesting things going on right under my nose. But I’ve also recently become a fan of the blog Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, which is a great way to eavesdrop on some of the conversations going on in the field and learn about new resources. (Their three-part entry on Digital Humanities in 2007 offers an excellent overview of recent developments.)

I think the realm of Digital Humanities offers a natural venue for collaboration between librarians, researchers and computer scientists, and the best projects combine the technical proficiency, subject knowledge, and information organization skills and end-user focus of all three groups.