Archive for the ‘Archives’ Category

  • ”’Using Versus Building’ in the Digital Humanities”

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    THATCamp session: ”’Using Versus Building’ in the Digital Humanities”

    In a recent Inside Higher Ed blog posting entitled “The Incredible Privilege of ‘Building’”
    www.insidehighered.com/blogs/college-ready-writing/incredible-privilege-%E2%80%9Cbuilding%E2%80%9D, Lee Bessette raises the issue of “using versus building” in digital humanities work and “who” does it. It is a topic that Matthew K. Gold and Stephan Ramsay have also engaged in their discussions about how “building and making” operates as a heuristic.

    This session looks “behind-the-scenes” of two Center for Humanities and Digital Research (CHDR) chdr.cah.ucf.edu/ archive projects. It examines the rationale behind an archive about “digital archiving”—the Digital Archiving Information System dais.cah.ucf.edu/ —and the range of topics, from planning, preservation, copyright, “representation,” and archive management, that anyone needs to engage in order to plan and build a digital archive. It delves into how we can better understand the potential of “the archive” as both a scholarly and teaching tool. In addition, it examines how the NEH-funded Charles Brockden Brown Electronic Archive www.brockdenbrown.cah.ucf.edu/archive/index.php follows, and departs from, standard conventions of “archiving” in regard to primary and secondary sources—and some of the specific issues that were encountered in building a searchable collection of texts, images, and other data.

    The session welcomes discussion about the practical aspects of doing digital humanities work in general, and digital archive work in particular.

    Mark Kamrath
    Patricia Carlton

  • Digital Collections and Scholarship, Baldwin and Others

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    Digital collections and libraries are often created through collaboration with librarians, teaching faculty, and others. This panel would be a discussion panel on current strategies and best practices for engaging scholars and librarians in collaboratively supporting digital libraries and new forms  of digital scholarship with those libraries. The discussion could include considerations of roles, practices, and concerns for best supporting and engaging with a scholarly advisory board for digital libraries, collections, and projects.

    The discussion could include a current example of how to best support the Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature Digital Collection in collaboration with and utilizing the expertise of faculty on campus as a scholarly advisory board. The Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature is one of the top of its kind in the world and faculty regularly travel to the collections, teach with the collections, utilize the collections in research, and more, all of these activities continue, extend, and alter in ways for the digital collections of the Baldwin.

    The discussion could also include the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) with its Scholarly Advisory Board, new forms of digital scholarship, facilitated peer review, and more.

    The discussion will include how to ensure full attribution and recognition for activities, as well as engagement and collaboration for ongoing development and for new opportunities for library growth and new digital scholarship works.

  • New Possibilities for Linking Archival Collections Using Encoded Archival Context – Corporate Bodies, Persons, and Families (EAC-CPF)

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    For researchers working with primary source material in archives, the paper trail can often be difficult to follow. Although standards like Encoded Archival Description (EAD) have helped make finding aids more visible and accessible, there is another layer that often remains invisible to researchers:  the sociocultural context of the people whose work is preserved in archival collections.

    The EAC-CPF standard was developed to bridge this gap and provide a way to describe the relationships among agents associated with archives, whether as creators or contributors. Large-scale projects like the Social Networks and Archival Context Project (SNAC) are currently laying the groundwork for a national archival authorities infrastructure. In the meantime, what can individual institutions or regional consortia do to implement EAC-CPF and improve access to their archival collections? One open source tool, for example (Ethan Gruber’s xEAC editor), allows users to create EAC-CPF stub records by importing data from DBpedia. New or enhanced EAC-CPF records, in turn, might be used to generate Wikipedia pages via the MediaWiki API.

    This session could serve as an introduction to EAC-CPF and related initiatives and could also provide an opportunity to brainstorm and discuss possibilities for implementing the standard locally or regionally.

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