Library Highlights from OPG, vol. 1, no. 4

Search Updates:

Several search committees are working hard to identify good candidates for a number of positions, some of which are newly designed positions. Active searches include:

• AUL for Research and Outreach Services
• Resource Acquisition and Management Librarian
• Library Materials Conservator
• Manuscripts Processing Archivist
• Digital Humanities Librarian
• Library Communications & Stewardship Specialist
• E-Science Librarian
• Digital Repository Manager

Facilities:

Most of Integrated Technology Services (Jean Rainwater’s group) and some of the Center for Digital Scholarship staff (including the Women Writers Project, Elli Mylonas, and Andy Ashton) have relocated to the 14th floor of the Science Library. Please stop by and check out the space!

From Digital Technologies:

A few recent items from Digital Technologies:

The Center for Digital Scholarship has installed a new digital camera capture system, thanks to a generous donor. The new system, now setup in 217 (within 218), combines a high-quality, vertically mounted camera and lens with a state-of-the-art 80-megapixel digital back from Leaf (now owned by Phase One). For digital captures of medium-sized prints and other materials, the new camera provides a much improved and much quicker workflow; images can be created in seconds rather than minutes. The previous scan back system (in 202) will be retained for larger materials, or in cases when more resolution is required.

CDS also hosted a couple of speakers in the past few months:
David Smith (UMass Amherst): “Infrastructure for Digital Humanities: Challenges for Computational Linguistics in Mining Million Book Collections” and Jean Bauer (University of Virginia): “Republicans of Letters: Historical Social Networks and The Early American Foreign Service Database.” Both talks were well attended by a variety of students, faculty, and library staff, and generated a lot of good discussion.

Bonnie Buzzell and Ted Lawless will present “The Next Step: “Locate This” about the Josiah book locator at the Innovative Users Group Meeting in San Francisco in April.

Birkin Diana presented “Enriching the digital junk drawer” at the Personal Digital Archiving workshop in San Francisco in February.

Elli Mylonas and Andy Ashton participated in a weekend workshop in February at Boston University about automated interdisciplinary subject tagging of humanities texts.

Michael Park and Andy Ashton attended the Open Annotation Collaboration workshop in Chicago in March. Andy presented, “Annotating Digital Texts at Brown University Library,” an overview of plans for building annotation/tagging tools for digital objects in the Brown Digital Repository.

Andy Ashton presented at the Nercomp Conference here in Providence. He discussed a planned collaborative project for a digital publishing service based at Brown. The talk was entitled, “The TAPAS Project: Creating a Shared Service for Digital Humanities Projects Using TEI.”

The Women Writers Project will host the fourth annual “Women in the Archives” Conference April 15-16, 2011. Keynote lecture by Laurie Crumpacker, Simmons College: “Teaching the New American Renaissance and Margaret Fuller.” Please consider attending!

Julia Flanders participated in a panel, “New Ways to Use Archival Data” at the New England Archivists’ conference this past weekend. Birkin Diana also presented a version of his “Enriching the digital junk drawer” talk at the NEA conference.

Services:

A number of web planning groups have re-convened to take a look at the long term management and development of the library web presence. The groups, led by Jean Rainwater, Sarah Bordac, and Daniel O’Mahoney will develop plans for assessing, updating, and managing the library web.

We have hosted several demonstrations of discovery tools, including Serials Solutions Summon, EBSCO EDS, and VuFind (open source). Additionally, Sarah Bordac and Jean Rainwater have had a number of interviews with students regarding their use of discovery tools like these. OPG and the RSDRG will convene to discuss the demos and student feedback and will decide how to proceed. Thanks to everyone for their great feedback.

In February, 344 people used moBUL, performing some 8400 queries. 44% connected with iPhones, 20% Blackberry, and 17% Android. 171 users performed some 5700 catalog searches. Other popular services were Hours/Locations (93 people, 605 queries), My Account (80 people, 240 queries), and Mobile Research (52 people, 97 queries). Unfortunately we don’t have data for the number of people who checked for Available Computers.

–
Andrew Ashton
Director of Digital Technologies
Brown University Library
April 4, 2011