(via the ACRL Digital Scholarship Section Professional Development Committee)
The ACRL Digital Scholarship Section Professional Development Committee is pleased to host a Lightning Talk Showcase on Friday, August 11, from 1:00 to 2:00 PM CDT. Please join us for an exciting lineup of presenters, including:
Sarah Newhouse and Celia Caust-Ellenbogen of the Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries (PACSCL) will speak about the group’s progress through the first half of this working group’s charter, and efforts it has made to lay the groundwork for ensuring future digital projects are pursued with intentionality. In nearly 30 years of its existence, PACSCL has accumulated a lot of digital assets through grant-funded and ad-hoc projects. A few years ago, PACSCL became increasingly interested in the sustainability of the projects produced and owned by the consortium itself, and also of the projects managed and owned by its 30+ member institutions. In 2021, PACSCL chartered a 3-year working group to focus on Technology Sustainability. So far the Working Group has compiled an inventory of current assets, a three-stage Digital Project Sustainability Tracking Form to continually monitor needs across PACSCL’s portfolio, as well as template MOUs (memorandums of understanding) to ensure alignment of expectations between PACSCL and institutions participating in digital projects. Additionally, the Working Group created a Digital Project Sustainability Framework, designed to be a resource for PACSCL member institutions pursuing their own initiatives, to help them better understand the areas of concern around sustaining and maintaining projects longer-term. This presentation will share these tools with attendees and speak to the methodology employed in creating them.
Emily Cukier, Science Librarian at Washington State University, will discuss preliminary results of a pilot project using the General Index to study the use of gendered honorifics in the scholarly literature over time. Launched in October 2021, the General Index is a public resource that offers unprecedented access to concepts represented in over 107 million scientific research papers through article keywords, n-grams, and corresponding metadata. The General Index opens the scholarly conversation to a broader range of academic and non-academic researchers alike, and creates an opportunity for them to employ diverse perspectives to search for gaps and biases. This presentation will address the challenges faced during this pilot project, including computer memory, storage space, and network speed/stability.
Nick Szydlowski, San José State University’s Digital Scholarship Librarian, will discuss the creation of Betita Martínez: A Memorial Exhibit. A founding figure in the Chicana movement, Betita Martínez was an author, activist, and educator whose writing and organizing had a profound impact in the Bay Area, New Mexico, and far beyond. Her work helped to shape not only academic discussion in Chicana and Chicano Studies and other disciplines, but also broader conversations about justice, race, gender, and identity.The exhibit, created in collaboration with Kathryn Blackmer Reyes, director of the library’s Africana, Asian American, Chicano, and Native American Studies Center, was created as a pilot for the library’s adoption of Minicomp/Wax as a digital exhibit platform, and of minimal computing principles more generally. This presentation will highlight three aspects of the project: first, the process of conceptualizing the exhibit and articulating its alignment with the library’s mission; second, the workflow of the exhibit, ; and third, the development process used to create the exhibit’s Memorials feature, which takes advantage of Wax’s flexible structure to build a visually engaging page out of text-based materials.
This program is presented by the ACRL DSS Professional Development Committee, in collaboration with the DSS Outreach Committee and DSS Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Committee.
The program is free to attend! Register here.
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar. A program recording will be distributed to registrants after the conclusion of the session.
Questions may be directed to Taylor Davis-Van Atta (tgdavisv@central.uh.edu), DSS Professional Development Committee Chair.