Recently, Digital Library of Georgia staff have attended and/or presented at fall conferences that have taken place in Georgia.
Georgia Council for the Social Studies
GeorgiaInfo site administrator Charly Pou attended the Georgia Council for the Social Studies annual conference held in Athens, Georgia October 16-17.
The Georgia Council for the Social Studies mission is to advocate for, support, and celebrate the advancement of quality social studies teaching for Georgia students.
At this conference, Charly attended presentations given by GALILEO staff, and spoke to social studies teachers across the state to learn about which resources they seek in the Digital Library of Georgia; he notes that the Digital Library of Georgia’s newspaper collections proved to be popular amongst social studies educators.
Digital Library Federation Forum
Digital Library of Georgia director Sheila McAlister and Digital Projects Archivist Andy Carter attended the 2014 Digital Library Federation Forum in Atlanta, Georgia, October 27-29 at the Georgia Tech Hotel and Conference Center. The Digital Library Federation promotes collaboration across institutions that build or use digital libraries, including archives, libraries and library service organizations, publishers, museums, and vendors. The program for the conference is available here.
Andy reports* that topics presented at the conference included:
1. Digital humanities and the library
– Several libraries (Columbia, Duke, University of Virginia, and Indiana University) reported on the development of digital humanities training programs for their staff
2. Discussion about a recent OCLC report on the challenges uniquely identifying researchers who have primarily written journal articles as opposed to monographs, and thus are not represented in national name authority files
– The report advocates for researchers establishing their own research identifier as early in their career as possible (Research identifiers are persistent digital identifiers that distinguish unique researchers).
– The report identified a staggering 100 research networking and identifier systems
– According to the World Bank, there are 9 million researchers worldwide
– The most common self-registered identifiers are ISNI (International Standard Name Identifier) and ORCID
3. An update on SHARE (SHared Access Research Ecosystem), a new effort to create a centralized notification system for research outputs.
4. Copyright issues and strategies for large digital collections such as HathiTrust and Digital Public Library of America
– There are 87,000 unique rights statements on materials in DPLA, a big challenge
– The University of Michigan received a grant for a copyright review management system that has made it possible to verify the copyright of post-1922 materials in HathiTrust. Many of these copyrights were never renewed.
5. Experimental scholarly publishing
– A new WordPress plugin, PressForward, has been adopted by several sites, including dh+lib (the site for ACRL’s Digital Humanities Interest Group), and Metaware (the ALCTS/LITA Metadata Standards Committee (MSC)’s public information site) for aggregating and publishing content from the web.
6. Academic Preservation Trust
– A consortium of 17 institutions, hosted by the University of Virginia, is building its own digital preservation network, The Academic Preservation Trust (APT)
7. Digital Humanities tools for analyzing digital collections
– This panel urged libraries to make their digital collections available in ways digital humanities researchers can use (e.g. supporting text and image analysis in digital collections). One site that does this is DocSouth Data, which provides access to the digital collections in Documenting The American South collections in formats that work well with common text mining and data analysis tools.
The panel also highlighted tools for text analysis that include
Voyant, a web-based reading and analysis environment for digital texts
TOME, a tool that employs topic modeling to explore and visualize text-based archives
dfr-browser, a topic model browsing interface for journal articles
More information about the 2014 Digital Library Federation forum is available here .
Society of Georgia Archivists Annual Meeting
Many Digital Library of Georgia staff attended the Society of Georgia Archivists Annual Meeting, held in Athens on November 6-7. The theme for the 2014 Annual Meeting was Plans and Strategies for the Future of Archives. You can read more about the Society of Georgia Archivists here.
On November 6, the Digital Library of Georgia’s Digital Projects Archivist Donnie Summerlin presented on the panel “Managing Our Digital Assets” where he described the selection of historic newspaper titles for digitization at the Digital Library of Georgia.
On November 7, the Digital Library of Georgia’s director Sheila McAlister presented on the panel “On ArchivesSpace: Introducing, Assessing, and Exploring the Collection Management Software” where she spoke about the Digital Library of Georgia’s examination of the collection management program ArchivesSpace.
Digital Public Library of America metadata librarian Greer Martin was also recognized at the Annual Meeting as the recipient of the 2014 Carroll Hart Scholarship for attendance at the Georgia Archives Institute.
This year’s conference began with four sets of breakout discussion sessions on digital archives stewardship that solicited input on accessioning digital resources, processing digital materials, providing access to digital archives, and the planning and implementation of long-term digital preservation. The findings from these breakout sessions will be used to determine the Society of Georgia Archivists’ future outreach, education, and programming with relation to digital archives.
Panel topics also included:
– Developing Georgia collections that represent local LGBTQ communities
– Leveraging standards and workflows to improve efficiency in small digitization units as demonstrated by Georgia State University Library’s digital projects staff
– Institutional disaster planning, Georgia disaster resources, and recovery for cultural collections
– Practical approaches for accessioning, processing, preserving, and providing access to electronic materials as presented by staff at the University of Georgia Libraries
– Exploring the functionality and implementation of ArchivesSpace in archival institutions across Georgia.
*Special thanks to Andy Carter for his detailed report of the Digital Library Federation Forum
