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Regular readers of our newsletter will notice some changes with this issue. First, the name: as we start our 24th year of publication, CLIR Issues is now CLIR News. The new name reflects both continuity and change. We will continue to publish bimonthly with a focus on our work and our community, as we have since issue one. But the new name also acknowledges a dramatically evolved information environment. The world’s first website was created barely seven years before CLIR Issues’ debut in 1998. Blogs were unknown until 1994. Over time, as content and discussions have become increasingly shared and linked online, CLIR has also expanded its forums to blog posts, webinars, Twitter chats, and—in response to the pandemic—online conferences. Our new name aligns the newsletter with the more distributed nature of these exchanges.
Readers will also see that we’ve updated the look of our newsletter and newsletter digest. We hope you like the new look and that you find the content of CLIR News timely and useful.
In January, CLIR released the Curated Futures Project, a guide for professionals in galleries, libraries, archives, and museums to navigate beyond discussions of decolonizing collecting institutions to begin taking practical steps to enact change.
Organized and edited by CLIR Postdoctoral Fellows and alumni Faithe Day, Synatra Smith, Jodi Reeves Eyre, John MacLachlan, and Christa Williford, the project is the first in a series of collaborations that respond to the theme, “A Third Library is Possible.” The theme draws from the possibilities of the “third university,” a notion developed by la paperson in the book, A Third University is Possible.
Contributors to five collaborative projects use a variety of mediums, including podcasts, gaming, and mapping visualizations, to speculate about aligning academic libraries with social impact. The projects include:
The Curated Futures Project is the third installment of the CLIR Collaborative Writing Project; previous publications were The Process of Discovery and A Splendid Torch. Unlike the earlier works, the current project’s authors began their work knowing that in-person engagement would be impossible.
“With many dealing with issues of physical, and sometimes digital (in)access to libraries, archives, and sites of exploration, these groups of collaborators were tasked with addressing questions we may not have imagined in previous years,” note the editors. “In this third CLIR Postdoctoral Fellowship collaborative project, we are well positioned to imagine the possibility of a ‘Third Library,’ a new space transcending individual institutions by challenging what we have come to know about the libraries of the past in order to create the library of the very near future.”
Get ready for spring break! In mid-March, CLIR’s Material Memory podcast will embark on an audio tour of libraries and archives at six Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Every two weeks, CLIR program officer and season host Sharon Burney will talk with library and archives leaders about the people, collections, and institutions that make the HBCU libraries among the world’s greatest treasures. Watch the season preview!
Follow Material Memory wherever you get your podcasts to be sure you don’t miss an episode.
The HBCU Library Alliance and CLIR’s Digital Library Federation (DLF) invite participation in the Authenticity Project, a fellowship program that provides mentoring, learning, and leadership opportunities for early- to mid-career library staff from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). The organizations are seeking fellowship applicants as well as volunteer mentors, with both opportunities open until March 15, 2022. Fellows will be announced in early April, with mentor announcements following.
The Authenticity Project is supported by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and will be led by program facilitators Flavia Eldemire, Cotina Jones, and Reginald White in coordination with DLF senior program officer Jennifer Ferretti and HBCU Library Alliance executive director Sandra Phoenix.
Fellows will be matched with two experienced library professionals who will serve as mentors. Each mentorship team will include an individual with HBCU and library experience, and another currently working in the fellow’s area of interest from the DLF community. Fellows will participate in virtual sessions and activities over four weeks during the summer of 2022. One cohort will run from early June to early July; the second cohort will run from early July to early August. These summer sessions will be followed by asynchronous discussions via Slack and Zoom through September. Fellows will also receive full travel, lodging, and registration expenses to attend the annual DLF Forum and Learn@DLF workshops.
Mentors will receive access to training on mentorship as well as a supportive community of peers, will support fellows’ learning through weekly discussions on specific topics, and will be granted stipends in acknowledgment of their time and commitment to the program.
The program, which supported its first cohort of participants in 2019, was on hiatus in 2020-21 because of the ongoing pandemic.
To learn more about the Authenticity Project and how to apply or volunteer, please visit the program’s website or email awards@diglib.org.
CLIR’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program is now accepting applications for Community Data Fellowships.
The fellowships are tied to projects that thoughtfully and ethically capture and share data relevant to historically underrepresented or misrepresented people, communities, and populations. Such data could include digital or digitized records of researchers and community members, materials from community archives, information captured from the web and social media, and records of individuals or organizations. Projects will focus on the collection, aggregation, description, preservation, and use of these data.
Community Data Fellowships are the newest offering in the Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, which for nearly 20 years has offered recent PhD graduates the chance to develop research tools, resources, and services while exploring new career opportunities.
Fellowship applicants must have received a PhD before applying; if a PhD has not yet been received, all requirements for the degree (including dissertation defense and final dissertation editing) must be completed before starting the fellowship.
All applications submitted before March 1, 2022, will be considered for fellowships starting fall 2022. CLIR and partners will continue to review applications received after March 1 on a rolling basis until all positions are filled. Partners will contact selected candidates directly for additional application materials and interviews. Visit https://postdoc.clir.org/join/ to learn more and apply.
CLIR continues to accept proposals from institutions wishing to host a fellow in fall 2022 and will soon recruit partners for the 2023 cohort. Visit https://postdoc.clir.org/join/ to learn more and then contact the team at postdoc@clir.org.
As the pandemic forced the 2021 DLF Forum to go virtual for the second year, DLF reprised its Community Journalist program. The program was developed to help build and sustain the community—and particularly to highlight new voices from the field—at a time when in-person meetings could not be held. The program provided stipends to eight DLF Forum attendees from a variety of backgrounds to reflect on their Forum experiences.
The reflections show a fascinating range of perspectives on the Forum, highlighting themes relating to public interest and supporting the commons, labor and ethics, truth in data and in education, community building, accountability, and inclusion.
Journalist, digital consultant, and scholar datejie cheko green weaves several of these themes together in observing that “Digital librarians are standard-bearers of the public interest in the present, and for generations into the future. They have inherited a deeply invisible moral pressure that big tech roundly eschews, one that, by design, places them at the contradictory intersection of professional undervaluation and civic indispensability. For institutions and repositories of learning, arts, culture and human knowledge that have stared down this digital reckoning and survived, it’s been those at the forefront of justice that have distinguished themselves and become best prepared for the Covid-19 pandemic, its meta-phenomena of socio-economic and digital inequalities, and the opportunities within.”
A call for proposals for the 2022 DLF Forum and related events, to be held October 9–13 in Baltimore, Maryland, will be released soon.
Kelsey Socha joined the CLIR staff on February 9 as administrative officer for the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC), for which CLIR has served as fiscal agent since 2017. Socha will work with IIPC senior program officer Olga Howlonia in supporting the organization, whose 52 members work to collect, preserve, and make accessible knowledge from the global web.
Socha holds a BFA in Theatrical Design and Production from the University of Michigan and an MS in Library and Information Science from Simmons University. She has served in a variety of library roles, most recently as head of adult services for the Westfield Athenaeum in Westfield, Massachusetts.
IIPC’s activities include providing a forum for sharing knowledge about web archiving; collaborating on research and development projects; funding technical, curatorial, and educational projects; managing working groups; and convening the annual Web Archiving Conference and General Assembly, which has recently been held virtually.
IIPC chair Kristinn Sigurðsson welcomed Socha in a recent address summarizing the organization’s current work and scheduled plans. “As the IIPC has expanded and matured, it became clear that we needed a new staff member to support our membership and our senior program officer,” he said. “We have now created a new position hosted by CLIR and are delighted that Kelsey has joined the IIPC team. With this reinforcement, I feel confident that we will be able to rise to our ambitious schedule, including the preparations of the IIPC’s 20th anniversary next year.”
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