Digital Libraries, Digital Archives, Digital Humanities, Digital Scholarship: What's the Difference? Prioritizing, Strategizing, and ExecutingJenn Riley
Head, Carolina Digital Library and ArchivesUNC Library
Scholarly Communication Working Group 2
A STORY…
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Scholarly Communication Working Group 3
Evolution of the “digital library”Item-level digitization/presentation with
non-MARC metadata
Curated online
exhibits
Addition of contextual materials:
essays, lesson
plans, etc
Application of MPLP ideas from archives
and special
collections
Rise of mass
digitization
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Scholarly Communication Working Group 4
“Digital humanities” evolved in parallel
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Early
• “Humanities computing”• Text encoding• Scholarly editions
Now
• Expansive, inclusive • Interactive• Digital collections
• Text mining• Computational linguistics
• Scholar-driven
•Spatial & temporal•Online reference works
•Collaborative
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Continuum of work
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Dig
ital
colle
ctio
ns
Onlin
e
exhib
its
Onlin
e
refe
rence
so
urc
es
Cri
tica
l ed
itio
ns
Imm
ers
ive
exp
eri
ence
s
Sp
ati
al
hum
anit
ies
Collecti
on
s Sch
ola
rsh
ip
Scholarly Communication Working Group 6
Enter Institutional Repositories
Preprints/OA
Campus grey
literature
Data sets
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Scholarly communication cycle
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Library buys
Scholar reads/accesses
Scholar does
research
Scholar writes
Scholar publish
es
We’re here
Should we be here?
Scholarly Communication Working Group 8
Some areas of emerging library involvement
Data management
plans• Funding
mandates
Open Access
• Faculty-led campus policies
Library as publisher
• Dissemination, not necessarily peer review/editing
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Scholarly Communication Working Group 9
And then we have born digital library acquisitions
(For which we take on stewardship responsibility)
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Personal papers
Research data
Administrative records
Student records
Government
publications
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And then…digital methods in instruction!
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Alternate forms of expressing research
Interactive research
Training digital humanists
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SO WHAT’S AN ACADEMIC LIBRARY TO DO?
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What’s next for digital collections?
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• Basic description, then possible enhancement
• Description from usersBuild over time
• Quick UI generation• Reusable, user-friendly collection
builder tools
Streamlined collection building
• Librarian and scholar built exhibits• APIs
More methods of access
• With other institutions• With web-scale servicesSharing
Scholarly Communication Working Group 13
EXPAND KNOWLEDGE, SPREAD THE
RESPONSIBILITY
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Tiered faculty-facing services
“First of a kind” collaborative
projects
API access to objects and metadata
Put collections online
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How do we ensure sustainability?We can’t.
• But we can make it more likely
Adhere to community practices• Metadata• Object formats• Software development practices• Business planning
Build core infrastructure• Upgrade/build once to benefit many• Avoid monolithic systems
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Modular architectures
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Small pieces, loosely coupled
• Microservices
• Allows specialized development
• Pipelined together into larger ones
Flexibility
• Presentation
• Storage• Easy
replacement of parts
Data flow
• More important than ever
• We need to get much better at this
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UNC’s interpretation of a preservation repository
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CDR
Faculty research
Born-digital
acquisitions
Locally digitized content
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SAVE A PLACE FOR EXPERIMENTATION
(especially in scholarly communication)
(we’re not all comfortable with this yet)
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Scholarly Communication Working Group 19
Balance reactive with proactive
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Assessment
Business planning
Project and respond to demand
Take the long view
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COLLABORATE
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