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CLIR Issues Number 98

CLIR Issues
Number 98 • March/April 2014
ISSN 1944-7639 (online version)

Contents

Interact with our New Map of CLIR’s Reach!
CLIR Appoints John Unsworth Distinguished Presidential Fellow
CLIR Names 2014 Mellon Dissertation Fellows
Mellon Awards Grants to Advance Work of Committee on Coherence at Scale for Higher Education
CLIR Names 2014 Rovelstad Scholarship Recipient
E-Science Institute Concludes; Peer Mentoring Group Begins
North American Working Group Revises LIBLICENSE Model License

We invite you to check out our weekly blog series, “Re: Thinking,” which features perspectives from a variety of contributors on topics relating to the emerging digital environment, research, and higher education. In the latest, Hannah Rasmussen, CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow in Knowledge and Library Services at Harvard Business School, blogs on defining our roles not by how we do our work, but why.

CLIR Issues is produced in electronic format only. To receive the newsletter electronically, please sign up at https://www.clir.org/pubs/issues/signup.html. Content is not copyrighted and can be freely distributed.

Follow us on Twitter @CLIRNews, @CLIRHC, @CLIRDLF


Interact with our New Map of CLIR’s Reach!

What do Paris and St. Louis have in common? A new interactive map from CLIR answers that question and more. The map locates the home institutions of Frye/LCI participants (St. Louis and Paris among them), research sites of Mellon Dissertation Fellows, organizations that have received Hidden Collection grants, CLIR sponsoring and DLF member institutions, Postdoctoral Fellow host institutions, and E-Science participants. Turn the data layers on or off, and zoom in to find details about the various projects and research!

We thank Mengdi Zhang, graduate student in the University of Michigan’s School of Information, for creating this map during her spring break internship at CLIR. Ms. Zhang is focusing her studies on human-computer interaction.


CLIR Appoints John Unsworth Distinguished Presidential Fellow

John_Unsworth.jpgCLIR has appointed John Unsworth Distinguished Presidential Fellow. Unsworth is vice provost, university librarian, and chief information officer at Brandeis University.

Unsworth’s research interests are in digital humanities, scholarly communication, the history of books and publishing, and twentieth-century American literature. He chaired the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences, which published Our Cultural Commonwealth in 2006. Since then, Unsworth has helped direct three projects focused on text-mining in humanities digital libraries. The most recent is an ongoing project involving faculty and librarians at the University of Illinois, Indiana University, University of Michigan, and Brandeis, to develop a virtual research center that provides computational access to all of the material in the HathiTrust, most of which was generated in the Google Books Project.

During his one-year appointment, Unsworth will focus on community building on behalf of the CLIR/DLF Postdoctoral Fellowship program.

“John Unsworth has provided rigorous and compelling leadership for the humanities and higher education as it evolves in the digital era,” said CLIR President Chuck Henry. “His scholarship, insight, and pivotal professional appointments have guided many of us as we engage with new technologies and their implications for the academy. I am delighted he will work with CLIR and help mentor our postdoctoral fellows as they assume leadership roles within our extended community.”

“I have been a supporter of the CLIR fellowship program since I was at the University of Illinois’s Graduate School of Library and Information Science, where we supported the online educational component of the fellowship program, taught by Elliott Shore,” said Unsworth. “I’ve seen a number of important careers shaped by participation in this program, and I am very pleased that at Brandeis, Library and Technology Services now has Margarita Corral as our first CLIR/DLF postdoc—she’s been a great representative of the program, and she has brought to our library exactly the kind of expertise and innovation that these postdocs are known for. It will be a pleasure to help Chuck and his team build this community over the coming year.”


CLIR Names 2014 Mellon Dissertation Fellows

Seventeen graduate students have been selected to receive awards this year under the Mellon Fellowships for Dissertation Research in Original Sources, which CLIR administers.

The fellowships are intended to help graduate students in the humanities and related social science fields pursue research wherever relevant sources are available; gain skill and creativity in using primary source materials in libraries, archives, museums, and related repositories; and provide suggestions to CLIR about how such source materials can be made more accessible and useful.

The fellowships carry stipends of up to $25,000 each to support dissertation research for periods of up to 12 months.

This year’s awardees are as follows:

Oscar Aguirre-Mandujano
University of Washington
Captured by Writing: Literary Language and Political Culture in the Court of Bayezid II (r.1481-1512)

Elisabeth Burton
Harvard University
Genetic Nationalism: Ethnic Mythmaking and Human Biology Research in Iran, Turkey, and Israel

Samuel Fury Childs Daly
Columbia University
Forging Nigerian Citizenship: Law and Bureaucracy in the Biafra War, 1967-1970

Alexander Eastman
Washington University in St. Louis
Binding Freedom: Cuba’s Black Public Sphere, 1868-1912

Edward Falk
University of California, San Diego
“Peaceful Conquest Through Education”: Missionary Education in Ottoman Syria

Devin McGeehan Muchmore
Yale University
“It’s All for Sale”: Erotic Entrepreneurs and the Moral Economies of Sexual Commerce in the Late-Twentieth Century United States

Stuart McManus
Harvard University
Globalizing Cicero: Humanist Eloquence in Early Modern European Empires

Emma Otheguy
New York University
Facing the Gallego: Indirect Creolization in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century Atlantic

Bernadette Perez
University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
Beets Better than Gold: Labor, Race, Nation, and the Politics of Belonging in the Development of Colorado Agribusiness

Michael Polczynski
Georgetown University
Antemurale Christianitatis, Memâlik-i Mahrûse: the “Bulwark of Christendom” and the “Well Protected Domains” of the Early Modern Polish-Lithuanian/Ottoman Frontier

Paolo Savoia
Harvard University
Saving Faces: Surgery, Masculinity, and the History of the Human Face in Early Modern Italy

Amanda Scott
Washington University in St. Louis
The Basque Seroras: Local Religion, Gender and Power in Northern Iberia, 1550-1800

Kathleen Tahk
Northwestern University
A Revolution Beyond Borders: The Soviet Art of the Latvian Riflemen, 1917-1938

Lucy Traverse
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Ectoplasmic Modernities: Materialization Photography at the Turn of the Century

Benjamin Weber
Harvard University
America’s Carceral Empire: Punishment, Work and Detention at “Home” and Abroad, 1865-1945

Elizabeth Woodward
University of Chicago
“Le Roman de la Poire”: Constructing Courtliness and “Courtly” Art in Gothic France

Ahyoung Yoo
The Ohio State University
“We Are In Open Circuits”: Technology, Globalization, and Contemporary Korean Art


Mellon Awards Grants to Advance Work of Committee on Coherence at Scale for Higher Education

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded grants to Vanderbilt University and the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Information Sciences for activities that will advance the work of the Committee on Coherence at Scale for Higher Education.

Vanderbilt University has received a strategic planning grant of $149,000 to support a year of targeted research, a series of symposia on new methods and interpretive strategies associated with digital humanities research, and planning meetings that will inform a strategic plan and five-year roadmap for the committee.

The University of Pittsburgh School of Information Sciences received funding for a new doctoral fellowship program for information sciences students worldwide who are working on digital projects designed to enhance scholarly productivity and enrich teaching. The $726,000 award will support 10 “iFellows” who will supplement the work of the Committee on Coherence at Scale with independent dissertation research.

The proposals were submitted to the Mellon Foundation in tandem.

Vanderbilt University and CLIR co-sponsor the Committee on Coherence at Scale for Higher Education, which examines emerging national-scale digital projects and their potential to transform higher education in terms of scholarly productivity, teaching, cost-efficiency, and sustainability. Committee members include college and university presidents and provosts, deans, university librarians, and association heads. Projects being examined include the HathiTrust, the Digital Public Library of America, and the Digital Preservation Network, among others.

“A unified digital environment could open the world of information to a truly international audience that before had no hope for such access,” said CLIR President Chuck Henry. “If you look at these projects in aggregate and pull them together, they represent almost every facet of knowledge organization within the context of higher education.”

Vanderbilt Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs Richard McCarty and Dean of Libraries Connie Vinita Dowell serve on the committee; Dowell and Henry will serve as principal investigators for the strategic planning activities.

University of Pittsburgh School of Information Sciences Dean and Professor Ronald L. Larsen and Visiting Professor and Mellon Cyberscholar Stephen Griffin conceived the doctoral fellowship program in collaboration with the Committee on Coherence at Scale. Five iFellows will be selected in 2015 and the remaining five will be selected in 2016. Each will receive a stipend of $50,000 to support their development of a PhD dissertation focused on issues related to coherence at scale. These include addressing topics such as scalable infrastructure, scholarly workflow, and the transformation of contemporary scholarship, increasingly characterized by the use of large scale, Internet-based data and computational resources.

Doctoral students from the 55 member schools of the global iSchools will be invited to apply for the fellowship program by submitting proposals demonstrating how their dissertation topics will fit the overall agenda of the Coherence at Scale project. The iFellows will be paired with faculty advisors and mentors from the University of Pittsburgh and other iSchool institutions. The call for proposals will be announced in the spring of 2014 at www.ischool.pitt.edu/research/ifellows.


CLIR Names 2014 Rovelstad Scholarship Recipient

Janetta_Pegues.jpg

Janetta Pegues, a library science student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has been selected to receive this year’s Rovelstad Scholarship in International Librarianship.

Pegues received a bachelor’s degree from Roosevelt University in Chicago, Illinois. She became interested in international librarianship while volunteering at a school in Gonaives, Haiti. “When I think about international librarianship, I think of library professionals who are concerned about making sure that the poorest people in the world have access to materials that will help them improve their lives holistically,” says Pegues. “In Gonaives, there are no public libraries; there is only one private library and most Haitians cannot access it.”

The Rovelstad Scholarship provides travel funds for a student of library and information science to attend the annual meeting of the World Library and Information Congress, which takes place in Lyon, France, in August this year.


E-Science Institute Concludes; Peer Mentoring Group Begins

By Rita Van Duinen

The 2014 E-Science Institute held its in-person capstone event April 2–4 in St. Louis. This was the last offering of the institute by DuraSpace. Staff from 16 institutions, including one international organization, made up the final cohort. Since the E-Science Institute began in 2011, staff members from 113 institutions have taken part for a common purpose: to develop a strategic agenda for e-research support while also developing new working relationships.

During the three-month institute, institutional teams undertook a series of exercises, including an environmental scan, interviews of key stakeholders, and a SWOT analysis. A select team of faculty facilitated this work through a series of webinars and supplemental sessions.

At the capstone event, faculty and institutional teams came together to share experiences and begin developing strategic agendas for e-research support. At the outset, there was much discussion among the teams about a variety of topics related to e-research services at their libraries. Common themes included staffing issues and approaches to re-skilling existing staff, lack of funding to develop e-research services, how to identify and establish relationships with key stakeholders on and off campus, risk assessment of implementing—or not implementing—e-research services, the need to identify the library as a place where these services can and do happen, and how to develop a common language about such services so that stakeholders are engaged.

At the end of the event participants were asked to reflect on their E-Science Institute experience. Staff from one institution said that they felt renewed and that a renaissance was taking place in libraries; five to ten years ago much of the discussion was focused on the library becoming obsolete. Others shared their relief in knowing that they weren’t alone in their struggles and frustration in getting e-research services off the ground at their institutions. It is a big issue to tackle and one that requires ongoing planning and discourse with support and engagement across the campus community. There is a desire to keep the conversation going across the current cohort and with other institutions involved in developing e-research services at their libraries.

And so the conversation continues. Participants will keep up the dialog within the relationships they have formed at the institute. The CLIR/DLF E-Research Peer Network and Mentoring Group (ERPNMG), now being established, will support these efforts. ERPNMG will provide a mix of formal and informal opportunities for networking, resource sharing, and collaboration supported by CLIR/DLF’s organizational resources, as well as access to structured webinars and personalized consultations. CLIR/DLF is working with E-Science Institute faculty and CLIR/DLF postdoctoral fellows in data curation to develop and facilitate the group. Ultimately, ERPNMG will create a network of practitioners through the process of sharing information on implementing strategic agendas.

The first official webinar will take place April 23 from 1:00-2:30 PM EST. A series of webinars and personalized consultations will run from April to October 2014. The course will culminate with an in-person event on October 26, 2014, where peer groups will have the opportunity to report back, connect, network, and collaborate. Participants will be encouraged to continue engagement with the community during the course and maintain regular meetings and contact after the course ends. CLIR/DLF will support the community of practice that emerges as a result of the networking group.

Consider becoming a part of the E-Research Peer Network and Mentoring Group and help us keep the conversation going. For more information please visit http://www.diglib.org/learning/erpnmg/.


North American Working Group Revises LIBLICENSE Model License

liblicense.jpgA team of North American library practitioners and experts, led by Ann Okerson, of the Center for Research Libraries (CRL), is preparing an update of the LIBLICENSE Model License for electronic resources. The license, first released in 1997, presents a negotiation framework to help libraries identify and incorporate in their licenses terms that provide readers the widest possible access to their chosen information resources, while supporting the fair use provisions of the US Copyright Act. The Model License was last updated in 2008.

Okerson, advisor on electronic strategies at CRL, oversaw development of the original LIBLICENSE Model during her tenure at Yale University Library and has led subsequent updates. The current work is being supported with funds from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

The project team began the rewrite effort in fall 2013. The group includes Ivy Anderson, of the California Digital Library; Julia Blixrud, of the Association of Research Libraries; Craig Olsvik, of the Canadian Research Knowledge Network; Tracy Thompson, of the New England Law Library Consortium; and Christa Williford, of the Council on Library and Information Resources. Lisa Macklin, of Emory University, is the project’s legal advisor and specialist.

The group will make an initial draft version available for comment by late spring 2014. Comments will be integrated over the summer, and CRL will release the Model License through its website. The software that enables users to build their own agreements based on the Model License standard language will also be completely rewritten and released later in 2014.

More information is available at http://liblicense.crl.edu/.


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