Plant propagation: Sexual and Asexual propapagation.pptx
Digital collections and humanities research
1. Digital Collections and
Humanities Research: What Do
Scholars Want?
Harriett Green
English and Digital Humanities Librarian
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Of King’s Treasuries, (GIGO) Wiki, (anti-) Google, and the
E-Protean Invasion: The Evolving Nature of Scholarly
Research MLA 2012 Roundtable
January 7, 2012
3. http://www.projectbamboo.org
Partner Institutions:
Mission: Australian National University
Indiana University
“How can we Northwestern University
Tufts University
advance arts and University of
humanities California, Berkeley
research through University of Chicago
University of Illinois, Urbana-
the development of Champaign
shared technology University of Maryland
services?” University of Oxford
University of
Wisconsin, Madison
5. Scholars and Digital Collections
Study
Why and how do humanities scholars
use digital collections in their
research?
What do scholars need in the
functionalities and features of digital
collections in order for them to be
useful in humanities research?
6. Participating Institutions
Indiana University University of Illinois
Michigan State at Urbana-
University Champaign
Northwestern University of Iowa
University University of
Penn State Maryland
University University of
University of Minnesota
Chicago University of
University of Illinois Nebraska at Lincoln
at Chicago University of
Wisconsin–Madison
7. Study Components
SURVEY INTERVIEWS
Web-based multiple • Follow-up with
choice and text entry volunteers from
survey survey respondents
Distributed to • Faculty from
randomly selected performing arts, art
one-third of English history, interdisciplin
and History faculty ary humanities
members at each centers, or digital
institution scholarship centers
at each institution
8. Types of Materials
Types of digital materials used in scholarship
70
60
50
40
Number of responses
30
20
10
0
Texts Images Audio Video Maps Other
9. Frequency of Use
Frequency of Digital Materials Use
0
5
18
13
Never (1)
Less than half of the time (2)
Equally print and digital resources (3)
More than half of the time (4)
Always (5)
23
10. Text Collection Preferences
―links to related material or bibliographic resources‖
―metadata must include rigorous bibliographic
information and stated principles, either explicitly
derived from existing modern critical editions or stated
as unique to this database.‖
―ease of access to items within collection (not half a
dozen mouse clicks to get to it)‖
―capability to be read on multiple devices
(e.g., iThing, laptop, desktop).‖
―The ability to annotate these texts in private and public
environments, where I could keep stuff for myself or
share it with others.‖
―Use of JavaScript or some system that is compatible
with software loaded on most research faculty's
computers (I have colleagues who often work on out of
date computer systems at home)‖
11. Image collection preferences
―Imaged books must include
flyleaves, covers, and marginalia.‖
―Images must cooperate with both
Powerpoint and Word.‖
―Ability to export in multiple formats
(i.e. jpegs and higher resolution tifs)‖
―information on permissions and how
to request them‖
12. Multi-media collections
preferences
―video ability to moderate sound and
size‖
―ability to embed in other sites (I use
my own websites for drafts of work in
multi-media)‖
―ability to export and listen/view in
another session‖
―Annotation tools‖
―detailed metadata, a time counter for
audio and video, downloadable‖
13. Possible To Do
―exporting files and creating my own text and
visual files either for teaching or research
purpose‖
―ability to create one's own "library" held on the
digital database's server space (like Hathi Trust
collections allow) -- a concern for those of us
who don't want to eat up all our hard drive space
with PDFs.
―knowing what is available! This is not obvious!‖
―high resolution (I do a lot of on-line work and my
eyes are really degenerating)‖
―More materials—access to obscure or rare
materials.‖
―Ability to know copyright issues or costs up
front.‖
14. Not There Yet
―Being able to bookmark particular
sequences of streaming video for later
replay‖
―pdfs on ALL TEXTS IMMEDIATELY
AVAILABLE‖
―interfaces for new devices
(iPad, etc.)‖
15. How do you use digital
collections?
―I tend to use magazines, newspapers, novels, and any digital
manuscript materials that are too esoteric or too far beyond
what I use to teach. . . . I use specific sites to see what might
be at a collection that is not available online and may require
a visit--like the Southern Historical Collection or the Newberry
Library.‖
―I use databases that offer digital collections of all ancient
Greek texts ever written to search for specific words and all
the texts these words have ever appeared in. . . . I have used
digital collections of images of inscriptions to check whether
the text is correct or to amend the text.
―I study the mass media, so I rely on databases of old
television and radio recordings.‖
―I frequently need to use Japanese language texts not
available in our university library (some not available in the
U.S. at all). These materials can be found in digital archives
maintained overseas.‖
16. The Future?
―If I could create a personalized launch
page where I can access my most
frequently used journals or other
electronic texts or images without having
to go through a laborious login process.‖
Humanities cyber-infrastructure
―Enabling anything like seamless access
to the cultural record will require
developing tools to navigate among vast
catalogs of born-digital and digitized
materials, as well as the records of
physical materials.‖—ACLS, Our Cultural
Commonwealth report (2006)
17. Thank you!
Harriett E. Green
English and Digital Humanities Librarian
University of Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign
green19@illinois.edu
Twitter: @greenharr
Notes de l'éditeur
[INTRODUCTION]
The American Memory collections at the Library of Congress, Early English Books Online, ARTStor,Google Books: digital collections are becoming increasingly instrumental in how humanities scholars find and use research resources. For the past couple decades, the focus was on quantity: How much material can a library or museum digitize and post online? (Zick 689) But now we in libraries ask: How can digital collections meet scholars’ research needs? In answer to this question, I’d like to briefly talk about The Bamboo Technology Project and within it, my study of humanities scholars and digital collections.
The Bamboo Technology Project, also known as Project Bamboo, is a multi-year Mellon Foundation-funded research initiative to build an e-research platform for humanities scholarship, which for our purposes includes the arts and humanistic social sciences. The Project Bamboo participants are an international consortium of research institutions in the U.S., UK, and Australia and research team members include teaching faculty, librarians, and academic technologists. The project began with a series of workshops/focus groups withscholars on how they conducted humanities research with digital materials (these planning reports are available on the Project Bamboo’s website).
And now for the past year and a half, the Phase 1 of Project Bamboohas focused on building tools and shared web services for a humanities e-research environment, such as HUBZero, an e-research platform originally built at Purdue for the sciences and being adapted for humanities e-research. I work on the Collections Interoperability team at the University of Illinois, which focuses on the development of metadata standards and connectors for cross-collection use. But all of the tools developed for Project Bamboo are dependent, of course, on content: What kinds of digital materials will be used with these tools and platforms? The project is starting with Google Books and the Hathi Trust Digital Library, but there are many specialized digital collections that scholars will want to use as well.
To determine how digital collections should be prepared to interact with the Bamboo platform, we launched a study this fall to examine these questions: in particular, what do humanities scholars need in the functionalities and features of digital collections in order to use them for humanities research?
I am the lead investigator of this study, and I am working with librarians and academic technologists to conduct it at these twelve research universities from the CIC and Bamboo partner institutions.
The study components consist of a online survey and forthcoming individual interviews with humanities faculty. The survey is the part of the study that I’ll be discussing today.The survey, which ran from mid-October through the end of December, was distributed to a random one-third of the English and History faculty at the aforementioned research universities and drew 62 responses. In the survey, scholars were asked if and how they used digital collections in their research, and I’d like to highlight just a few of the results from the preliminary data analysis:
When respondents were asked what types of digital materials they most frequently used, texts were the top vote-getter, followed by images and maps.
When asked how frequently they used digital versus print resources, approximately 37% of respondents said they used print and digital resources in equal amounts, while 29% said that they used digital resources less than half of the time and 20% said more than half of the time. This data suggests that most notably, humanists utilize deeply interconnected and hybrid research practices that must be kept in mind as we develop digital collections.
Respondents were then asked to identify the three top features needed for digital collections in each of the following formats: texts, images, and multi-format media (which includes videos, audio files, etc.). For collections of text, the ability to download files and granular search systems were paramount. Some of the respondents’ comments included:“The ability to annotate these texts in private and public environments, where I could keep stuff for myself or share it with others.”“Use of JavaScript or some system that is compatible with software loaded on most research faculty's computers (I have colleagues who often work on out of date computer systems at home)”
For collections of images, the most frequently identified functionalities were viewing and zooming tools, high-quality scanned files, and ability to edit and crop images. Some of the respondents’ comments are here and included:“Imaged books must include flyleaves, covers, and marginalia.” “information on permissions and how to request them”
And for multi-format media such as video and audio files, the answers were more wide-ranging, but included comments here such as:“ability to embed in other sites (I use my own websites for drafts of work in multi-media)”This also highlights a thematic need that repeatedly emerged in the overall survey data: a desire to take these digital materials and reshape and reconstitute them in visceral ways for research.
The respondents were then asked to list functionalities or features that “would induce you to use digital collections more frequently in your research?” This question might have been wrongly phrased, as some respondents gave rather defensive responses such as “I don't need to be induced.” But most respondents gave answers that ranged from the possible to a couple things that are far less likely. The possible ones include these, including one I wanted to highlight:“Ability to create one's own ‘library’ held on the digital database's server space (like Hathi Trust collections allow)”This is possible, but is incredibly dependent on available resources: while the HathiTrust has the server space and infrastructure, many libraries and other smaller institutions may not.
But then there were requested features that in the library world, are on the level of Star Trek:“Being able to bookmark particular sequences of streaming video for later replay” Enabling searchability to video is incredibly hard—we’re barely able to adequately catalog them with metadata right now.Themes of personalization, granular searching, access, and high-res digitized files dominated these survey responses, which possibly suggest that digital collections are useable inasmuch as they are adaptable to research needs and technological skills.
Now when respondents were asked about the specific uses of digital collections in their own research, these are some of the responses, including:“I frequently need to use Japanese language texts not available in our university library (some not available in the U.S. at all). These materials can be found in digital archives maintained overseas.”As these sample responses indicate, scholars use digital collections as both critical sources and research tools: they mine mass collections of material, verify transcriptions, and access materials that previously would have required a summer travel fellowship.
This study is still ongoing with more survey data to be analyzed and a round of forthcoming interviews. But this early data—including this quote here—suggests that humanities scholars are utilizing digital resources in complex ways that mine and manipulate materials in order to weave new webs of intellectual conjecture,.This evolution in scholarly practice lends support to arguments for a humanities cyber-infrastructure and virtual research platforms that has been/will be discussed in this session by Dean and Doug, was a big theme on Thursday at the Future of Higher Ed panel; and has been investigated in research reports by the ALCS and others: Collaborative, networked spaces where humanists can work and interact.
As this research continues, I anticipate that we will learn how the scholarly process for humanities scholars is undergoing a complex and multi-faceted transformation that involves a recalibration of skills, a re-evaluation of scholarly perspective, and the emergence of a collaborative consortium between scholars, libraries, and technologists. Thank you for your time!
