 Good morning Thanks to all of you for coming for braving those the major snowstorm. Oh, that's what we call it in Washington anyway Few snowflakes coming down For coming, but I know That many of you are concerned about the weather and I appreciate you're staying for our sessions today at the December C&I membership meeting I'm Joan Lippincott. I'm the associate director of the Coalition for Networked Information And I'm joined this morning by two terrific co-presenters Harriet Hamasi from Brown University and Vivian Lewis from McMaster University and our plan today is for me to start with an overview of trends in digital scholarship centers what I'm seeing in my travels and as I study and various websites or programs as I talk with people and Then Harriet will tell us about the most recent developments at her center and Vivian will talk about what's going on at McMaster But in addition about a melons funded study in which she's a co-PI The three of us will speak in turn and we'll leave all the Q&A for the end. So let's get going. I I Imagine that many of you are here because you're Contemplating establishing a digital scholarship center in your institution Or you already have one and you'd like to see how you measure up what you're doing That's more than some of the examples here or where you may want to add services or Technologies and want to see the lay of the land. I Really encourage all of you to use the CNI website as a deep resource for examples of Current Projects in this area. We've had some sessions on digital scholarship centers for several years Including the one at University of Virginia a joint session with Brown and University of Nebraska a session at Columbia one at UCLA Knightly the liberal arts organization did a presentation that included some reference to digital scholarship centers in Liberal arts colleges and University of Richmond two of the staff from their digital scholarship center did a presentation at CNI so these would give you examples of What these centers are what they do what kinds of projects they're involved in and in many cases will have the power points Available pointers to the website etc. So it's a good place to study if you're planning your own facility One of the things that's intrigued me some of you know that I've worked in the area of information and learning commons for many years is Standardization of what we call facilities and I have used the term digital scholarship center for some time But it really wasn't clear how much that was used as a standard name. So I did a Google search recently Putting digital scholarship center in quotes and came up with 13,900 hits and you'll see that on the right at least the top Hits and going further down as well were indeed genuine digital scholarship centers at academic institutions and I found another a number of variants of the name and Just wanted to share with you some of these Names so that if you're establishing one you may have some choices here that you'd like to consider An important distinction I think needs to be made between digital humanity centers and digital scholarship centers at least the way that I conceive them There may be many differences, but I think these are some of the most salient a Digital scholarship center is administered by a library or information technology unit or some other Non-departmental unit and by that I mean not a history department or a biology department unit Whereas a digital humanity center grows out of the faculty and it may be administered by a department and Institute, but it is really Run by those faculty Most digital humanity centers are limited in for use to buy the Affiliated individuals the faculty members who established the center and their graduate students primarily Whereas if it's administered by the library it or some other neutral party in the institution It's open to all members of the community which may Include faculty graduate students and in some cases undergraduates, especially doing capstone projects Or it may be open to anyone, but I think that's a one of the most important reasons to consider having such centers in the library or in a computing facility some place that is neutral on campus and Also, obviously a digital humanities center focuses on humanities disciplines Sometimes the center may focus on something now or like American history even the Civil War But most digital scholarship centers are multi-disciplinary Not only serving the humanities, but in many cases if not most the social sciences and in some cases the sciences as well I Do think there are commonalities though between digital scholarship centers and digital humanities centers And they're more than these but some of the important ones are they need high-end Often expensive technologies, whether it's the hardware or software They need people with expertise to use these technologies in research and in academic work and They're all everyone is still trying to understand how we can fund these at scale and Sustain these facilities and keep refreshing equipment and training staff some of the reasons that Institutions have established digital scholarship centers I think primarily because of trends in research the focus on e-research data-intensive research That's affecting all disciplines whether it's the arts humanities social sciences or sciences so libraries and Academic computing have traditionally supported research In many forms and now we need to support e-research They bring together these expensive technologies for use by all campus departments and Particularly the humanities departments are usually the ones that never have any money or seldom have money for expensive technologies So they're the ones who are often the particular target in the initial development of these facilities in addition that they're It's unlikely that every department in a university even a research university is going to be able to staff A facility with high-end technologies with the kinds of expertise that are needed and the types of long-term one-on-one consultation to projects that may be needed in such Centers But the compelling reason for me and the reason that I have been Particularly interested in this phenomenon is that I'm very concerned about Graduate students who are interested in doing e-research Activities whether as their thesis or dissertation or some other project that will enable them to develop skills Either to go into an academic post when they graduate or as we see More and more to go into professional positions in other types of organizations whether or nonprofits business or whatever We're having really high-end technical skills is going to benefit them greatly in the job market but some of these graduate students don't have Mentors or advisors who have those requisite technical skills to assist them with projects The advisor may say yes It's fine with me if you do this type of project But don't look to me to me for support of the technical side of your work I'll support the content side of your work And so these graduate students can come to these centers and get the kinds of in-depth one-on-one Consultation that they need to achieve their projects to really develop new Ways of doing research in their disciplines and to help prepare for their future careers In looking in Visiting a small number of centers and in looking on websites and talking with people these are some of the activities And services that are offered by digital scholarship centers not all do the same thing Most of them offer workshops some offer for credit courses and others offer certificate programs Pretty much all of them offer one-on-one Consultation many have developed or offer online tutorials a Small number have fellowship programs where they're funding graduate students from departments To work part-time in their lab and to do their research at University of Virginia which has one of the most robust programs of this type They actually have two types of fellows and one of the kinds of one of the things They're trying to develop is a cohort of students who support each other in their work who have daily interaction with the staff of the Digital Scholarship Center and through that they're creating a community of e-researchers Who support each other and share information and expertise? There the digital scholarship centers work in a variety of areas So e-research of course is a given but some of the more specific topics that are addressed Through services in these centers are intellectual property issues standards for formats for projects Overall scholarly communication issues digitization digital preservation Some are offering publishing. This is a fairly new one on my radar and more Staffing is something that I know you're all curious about and you'll find a variety of models Some are heavy with faculty appointments along with some librarians or technologists others include graduate students and others and There are many profiles of staffing of these centers I've only visited a small number of these facilities when I was at UCLA They were hosting an NEH summer Institute where faculty and postdocs from around the country were coming to work on digital Projects in the space and it was just really beautifully configured for that kind of event. I Particularly liked the graduate fellow lounge at UVA It showed me the ways in which they're trying to create community by offering a comfortable and even somewhat playful area for graduate students to congregate and share ideas and conversation One of the things that I'd like to explore further is when do we call something a digital scholarship center? Whether the facility uses that name or not in the information common space There's some libraries that have something that's like an information commons, but they don't call that They don't use that terminology. Is that true for digital scholarship centers? For example at the visualization lab at NC State at the New Hunt library They don't call that a digital scholarship lab, but they're doing very high-end digital projects with support from their staff Close interaction with faculty, etc. Something I think deserves exploration One of the things that delights me is the really excellent web presence of many of these centers Totally unlike the web presence for information and learning commons, which is often truly non-existent in many libraries And I wanted to point out Occidental College a small liberal arts college in California look at the extensive program that they're describing for their digital Scholarship Center addressing both both teaching and learning aspects and research aspects of digital scholarship the University of Utah is highly Highlighting some of the projects that have been developed, which I think is really important to understand What are the kinds of outputs of the work that's done in these? these facilities and At brown which will hear more about they give a very concise Chart of the different areas of expertise in which they'll provide Consultation and the types of services and I've I've cut off the Photos of the various staff that will support but it's very easy for users to come to the website and see what's available. I Wanted to make you aware that we're planning a C&I round table Probably next spring of this coming spring spring 2014 on Digital scholarship centers and some of the things that we'll try to do In that round table are to understand both current and best practice and trends in these Arenas including the types of projects the facilities the funding models I know interests all of you the staffing and also the opportunities and barriers Some of the kinds of questions. I hope will address are what have been effective mechanisms for starting a center I don't know that the build if you build it. They will come model is the one that works here I think many of these centers have established Relationships with faculty or departments before they develop the center How have genuine partnerships with faculty been achieved? What have been some notable? successes what are the biggest challenges or roadblocks and what assessment has been implemented? How do we know that this is working? Are we achieving what we're hoping to accomplish? I'd like to know in the Q&A what else you would like to know about current and best practice this round table will be Through both an open call and invitations and it will have very limited attendance, but will result in a report So that's all for me right now And I'm going to turn it over to our next presenter Harriet Hamasi from Brown University. Thank you Good morning, and thank you Joan and thank you For being present as Joan pointed out. It's great to look out in this great big room and see sizable group of people The 21st century has been referred to as the golden age of learning a Time in which students will have near universal access to the highest quality of teaching and Scholarship at minimal cost Including unlimited choices about what where how and with whom to learn Changes that we as librarians are helping create Promise to bring about the most beneficial Efficient and equitable access to education the world has ever seen Anyone who can access the internet can access the research and teachings of some of the greatest scholars of our time and throughout history even so a Digital divide is brewing in the academy not due to the absence of technology or limitations to online resources rather the divide we face is in how human Capacities will be engaged and how the best traditions of scholarship and teaching will be adapted to the possibilities of our time How will we use and be guided by innovations in technology to reimagine and reinvent teaching learning and research? How will we enhance current methods and practices as well as scholarly modes of inquiry and communication? Even when this surely means disrupting long-held traditions that define today's academy The purpose of this talk is to relate some of the ways that the library at Brown Has been adapting and changing ideas processes spaces skills and most importantly visions and realities in Order to both foster and unleash the creative passion So that we may become Fuller participants in the 21st century and help shape the language and future of our era No doubt many of you could tell a similar story The idea for how to repurpose this space was not a great leap of vision Though plans came gradually they were deliberate We began by digitizing the Garibaldi panorama a scroll dating back from the 1860s that is approximately four feet tall and 260 feet long and painted on both sides Once the digitization was completed We stitched together the images and posted them on a website where the panorama could be slowly moved forward and backward To gain easier manipulation of this massive artifact We worked with Brown computer science professor Andy van Damme and his students to expand the native capabilities of the Microsoft surface so that we could navigate the panorama and Combine it with a range of associated documents layered throughout the scroll The surface proved especially useful for small groups, but completely unsatisfactory For more than three or four people at a time What we needed was a big screen in an interactive Multifunctional lab to support the development and exploration of this and other new forms of digital scholarship We also needed a donor to help cover the cost We were fortunate to get both and the new lab opened just over a year ago This 1200 square foot space with around 30 seats Features a 7 by 16 foot video wall comprised of 12 55 inch High high resolution LED screens with a combined resolution of over 24 megapixels The lab is also outfitted with a surround sound audio system Video conferencing capabilities specialized lighting and two individual touchscreen monitors that can be used independently or linked to the video wall to collaborate To enable collaborative display and interaction We were also able to hire a full-time manager to oversee the operation of the lab The lab is supported by robust easy to use software Combined with 14 independent or alternately coordinated screens in the room Our overarching goal in creating the lab is to support scholarly experimentation and Ambition helping faculty and students explore and define scholarly activities and forms Beyond their current capabilities as shown here in the digital storytelling class As this first year has progressed we continue to look for ways to maximize the capacities and intelligence of this new Landscape from the individuals and groups working in the lab or not to the tools They use or want to use to the different kinds of data They want to visualize and the various questions. They want to examine as in this paleography class This flexible space Facilitates group work and projects and enhances collaborative problem-solving as shown in the public humanities class In addition to the several courses being taught in the lab We also host bi-weekly presentations by Brown faculty and other invited guests Professor Sean Greenleaf from the Rhode Island School of Design is shown here Demonstrating his research on data sonification He is using images to both create and distort sound Another example of reusing and rethinking basic scholarly elements is Professor John Kaley's demonstration of a perceptual reader that is highlighting common phrases in a text Not only challenging typographic conventions But also questioning how our approaches to reading may change in the future and Here we see slides from a recent presentation on participatory mapping by Professor Joe Gouldy from the history department in Talking about crowdsourcing Professor Gouldy pointed out how Google Maps have actually made this activity more difficult At least for those who try to annotate a printout with pencil While we acknowledge that in many ways space equal service We like many of you both aspire and struggle to establish the library's role Not only as stewards of space and data But also as providers of digital services that support production and dissemination of knowledge We seek meaningful opportunities to work alongside faculty and students and to encourage and enhance their ability to analyze, augment, create, visualize and interact with data in its many forms In consulting with faculty on the development of digital projects We are often more easily accepted as valued collaborators becoming critically involved in the curation and ultimately the galvanization of data giving them new life Introducing a sense of agency to both act and be acted on Our work can also help faculty re-imagine their own scholarly questions and intellectual arguments Promote the distribution and preservation of their scholarship as well as enhance their methods of teaching Perry in Japan is one of the library's digital projects which began in the early 2000s, but fulfills many of the characteristics just mentioned Using the capabilities of its time This site also fulfills important qualities of digital scholarship that are much valued today and promoted in the lab such as collaboration social participation scholarly interpretation new forms of dissemination and the ability to iterate and expand on the base theme as well as form This joint project began with American studies professor Susan Smollion With our working together to examine and then digitize the library's more than 100 year old Japanese scroll depicting Commodore Matthew Perry and his troops visit to Japan Over time the project has evolved by adding access To related images published accounts of the 19th century explorers and also 21st century student research papers Note that the website was also reviewed in teachinghistory.org While the visual images may be its most appealing feature The accompanying commentaries written by students at Brown and the University of Tokyo Provide an invaluable intellectual contribution Specifically the students disagree about what the images contain and what they mean Here we see the landing scene on the original scroll painted in the 1860s by an anonymous Japanese artist And here we see a similar scene from the same period of time A lithograph drawn by expedition artist William Hiney The University of Tokyo students were much more skeptical about these peaceful charming images than the U.S. students Reactions from the Tokyo students parallel those of an earlier Chinese scholar Who questioned the motives of the American soldiers saying they swaggered and appeared arrogant Brown students dismissed this description As biased Even as the site provides access to unique and compelling resources Like other forms of scholarship It also prompts questions about historical evidence And how differently it can be viewed and interpreted Garibaldi and the resurgimento Recently built in collaboration with Italian studies professor Massimo Riva Demonstrates a much more flexible collaborative and interactive platform than the earlier Perry and Japan project The Garibaldi site draws content directly from the brown digital repository Rather than it's being stored or duplicated on the website Providing a framework for interactive collaboration and annotation as shown here The site also offers end users much greater control and choice In how they navigate or play the site Making them active Participants almost taking on the role of authors or performers as they create their own customized pathways and combinations Rather than being driven by big data experts who might want to prove their number crunching capabilities This data mapping project was developed with English professor Jim Egan First as a humanities teaching tool to allow students unfamiliar with the history of colonial british american Reading and printing practices To see the range of genres published in europe's american colonies and to demonstrate the regional differences in reading and publishing habits While the project's pedagogicals goals remain crucial Early data visualizations suggest that the data mapping could be expanded to investigate deeper patterns in colonial publishing And perhaps even generate a multi-faceted comprehensive map of materials published in the new world Visualization in the humanities is a graduate course Co-taught this fall in the lab by a professor in american studies and another from italian studies The weekly lab sessions have been taught by one of our digital humanities librarians gene bauer shown here The course covers a range of topics including visual thinking visual display of information types of visualization Computational information design as well as modeling and printing In their various ways and at their various times Each of these presentations projects and courses Have helped us at least partially understand and fulfill the promise of the digital scholarship lab They also now lead us to think about what new skills and spaces are needed To support the growth of digital scholarship across campus And to enable new learning in the face of rapid change Perhaps it will come as no surprise that we're already thinking about the possibility of a new space and service center in the library Building on the vision and success of the lab the adjoining studio Will be an open fluid space for consultation and production As well as seminars and small classes All flexibly designed to meet the changing research and learning practices and expectations Of students and faculty Thank you Thank you, harry and some really interesting examples of the Um interaction between research teaching and learning at brown And now we'll have vivian Lewis from McMaster Good morning I have two very simple objectives in in speaking this morning First I I wish to share with you a small glimpse into some of the activity that is going on At McMaster in the Sherman Center for Digital Scholarship during its first year of operation And second I wish to provide a brief update on a Mellon funded grant I have the great privilege to be working on That explores the skills and competencies Required to support digital scholarship in the modern university campus All of that in 15 minutes, so I'll speak quickly and show lots of pictures First a glimpse into the Sherman Center And in preparing my remarks I I realized that an alternative title might actually be more appropriate What I'm really speaking about this morning is life after the ribbon is cut And the scholars and the staff settle into the real business Of harnessing the power of computers to make sense of large amounts of data As you can see in this shot We had all the usual cast of characters at our opening in november of 2012 We had the president and the dean of humanities. We had a student artist And this was a wonderful day And we were extremely proud of it The Sherman Center is built with one of the largest Individual gifts ever given to the university library And the space is located on the first floor of our humanities and social sciences building The center was built with five very simple objectives in mind To promote the sharing of resources between the library and campus researchers To deliver robust and scalable IT infrastructure To provide technical expertise and consultation to all of those new scholars coming up through the ranks To provide welcoming spaces to our new digital scholars And finally to support the library's growing digital archive program Our first job was really to pull together the expertise required to support this kind of enterprise The team is small but mighty made up of six core individuals We started by naming dale askey the acting The excuse me the associate university librarian for library and learning technologies Dale is with us here at the cni meeting We appointed him as our administrative director of the center We then reached out to the dean of humanities for assistance in identifying an academic director And through a competition we identified dr. Sandra Le pointe top left hand corner who teaches in philosophy Then we built a small core staff John fink digital scholarship librarian and matt macalo a programmer were pulled from the existing library staff to work in the center Gabriella merche digital repository librarian was a new hire for the center And finally jason brajure was appointed as a postdoctoral fellow Affiliated with the sherman center Space of course has proven to be a critical component of the sherman center program during this first year Center staff aim to build capacity for digital scholarship on campus by creating opportunities for faculty researchers To actually bump into each other and this has really become a very important part of the daily life of the center The space includes soft seating public presentation space Work spaces assignable to individuals and to small teams A meeting room and a very popular pot of coffee The strength of the center Is built around a growing body of research projects affiliated with it There are currently eight active projects This slide lists three very new projects that have been identified through a competition And as jone was saying herself that strength of these centers is often the graduate students and all of these three projects again identified through competition Our graduate students at McMaster Who have won an opportunity to take up space in the center to have access to the expertise and the it Infrastructure and receive a small stipend And i'm particularly thrilled to see the broad spectrum of topics being addressed here From the dairy industry to war veterans to noun countability in world english's The top photo here sees workspace This particular individual is one of those graduate students who's been assigned a spot for a one year period to work within the center And the bottom photograph shows our maker space, which has really become a very important and critical Connection with the campus community. We provide all sorts of material Books Equipment we have raspberry pi workstations and it's become a great opportunity for people to drop into the center And learn some of these skills required to do digital scholarship in big ways and in small ways The really wonderful thing about the center is the opportunity to dip into new approaches and new technologies Some of which were not even Thought of at the point that the center was created just one year ago We have our digital repository librarian Working to build a repository for our growing collection of digital Images and we're hoping to release that in early 2014 We also have that same individual working on the escarpment press, which will become a platform for mcmasters online journals One of the colleagues in the center is also working on a very major cloud storage project being led by ochle the anterio A consortium and i'm expecting that in coming cni meetings. We're going to hear lots about the the cloud storage project And we also have a colleague working on docker a data visualization tool that is becoming quite exciting to everyone in the center This particular image shows mixed medium art located at the entryway to the Sherman center The original concept was a wall of family photos But in this case we have television sets replacing the heads And the mural was designed again by an art student through a juried competition And each one of the screens is managed by one of the staff members in the center One monitor actually provides a data visualization of library circulation data. The staff are very interested in that particular monitor Another monitor actually visualizes nasdaq trading volume I have to admit i'm particularly interested in the monitor that shows the locations of all of the hockey arenas in canada And of course the center has become a true Location for collaboration for arguments for epiphanies and for discovery and this is something that we are particularly excited about But I thought I should share with you some sense of the early observations that we've made during this first year First we've learned the critical importance of defining the center for the campus community We hear time and time again that there is no single accepted definition for digital scholarship I've heard researchers say I think I might be a digital scholar But I wouldn't tell my grandmother because she wouldn't know what I was talking about And I might not tell some of my faculty colleagues So given that confusion and hesitancy It's not surprising that digital scholarship centers sometimes find themselves Having to clarify their purpose for the campus community I've had people ask me What happens in the center? I know this question is sometimes annoying to the staff who work in the center They are doing great work But it falls outside the traditional norms of how research is done Research is supposed to be a solitary activity. No bumping around required In terms of libraries, it's definitely out of the box And in part I think that this is because libraries are traditionally very transaction based organizations We count and take huge pride in the number of people who enter our doors And the number of students who ask us research questions or attend instruction sessions We do not yet have wonderful mental models for how we can track and evaluate the activity going on within digital scholarship centers The relentless need for physical space creates pressure on our digital scholarship center Faculty members and graduate students are often trolling the halls at McMaster Looking for a space to run their experiments or to have their meetings We often find ourselves having to turn faculty members away If their research is not actually forwarding the digital scholarship agenda Or if their activities are actually more commercial than research based And so saying no is not easy But sometimes we need to say no to maintain the integrity of the digital scholarship space We've learned a very important target audience for us are our graduate students Our grads are receptive to new forms of scholarship They are very cheap to entice to meetings They have a profound impact on the faculty who supervise them Their power on campus cannot be underestimated Digital scholarship centers are not created in a day or even a year Building a good center requires organizational patience Patience on the part of our senior university administrators Patience on the part of other staff The digital scholarship program is built through relationships and relationships take time They're also built upon the careers of our scholars They build as junior faculty members develop skills and then go on into higher levels of the academy And finally we've discovered the great need for training and mentorship opportunities on our campus Our graduate students do not enter their programs with deep DS skills And most of our staff do not come to the workplace with the technical skills required to support them We are all learning as we go along I'd like to briefly turn your attention To the Mellon funded grant that I have the great privilege to be working on during the last several months This is the research team. So I I have the great privilege to be working with Shimu Wang He's here at the meeting Shimu is the dean of libraries at the University of Cincinnati I'm also working with Lisa Spiro executive director of the digital scholarship services at Rice University And finally John Cawthorne associate university librarian florida state We have a singular opportunity to explore best in class digital scholarship centers And what we're trying to do is to determine through site visits and interviews The key workforce related factors associated with these centers success We have in doing so taken a fairly specific approach to definition By skill we're referring to learned capacities to carry out specific tasks So in this way learning excel is a skill. It's often gained through repetition and formal training But on the other end we have capacities that are much more abstract and require a fitness for success Psychologist David Middleton sees three different kinds of competencies Cognitive competencies for example computational expertise Emotional competencies for example self-awareness And finally social competencies for example entrepreneurialism Our scope is admittedly broad We are looking at both physical centers and distributed services We recognize that those physical centers are often but not always located in university libraries We are not looking just at digital humanities centers We are looking at multiple disciplines sciences social sciences humanities And we're also not looking simply at the skills and competencies required for library staff We're looking more broadly at the skills and competencies required by the campus community And finally we're not simply taking a north american approach to the study We're been encouraged to go broadly and we're intending to visit four us locations One in canada two in europe and three in the bricks countries Many people have asked us what our criteria are for selecting those sites Thank you. I'll just be a moment here We're looking at sites that have a very strong record of successful projects We're looking for sites that have national and international recognitions And perhaps most importantly we're looking at sites that have a clearly articulated vision They know what they want to do and they're heading in that direction We have four confirmed sites. We've already visited the scholars lab shanty vislab and a variety of other Organizations at the university of virginia And we have three other locations that have already been chosen And of course we're currently finalizing our international travel. We're looking at sites in brazil, england china and japan Here's a picture of us on our first site visit to the university of virginia And I would encourage you if you're interested in the broad concept of skills and competencies to support digital scholarship to follow us on our blog Thank you