Digital Libraries and Librarians of the 21st Century

SUMMARY

New forms of scholarship and publishing are radically and rapidly changing the relationships among those who create, store, distribute, and use information. This paper will focus on the changes in library collections and library information technology organizations, the resulting advancements in scholarly research, and will discuss the attributes, attitudes, and skills needed by the librarians of tomorrow to develop the strong connections between the academic disciplines and research libraries that are essential for library development in the 21st century.     

The Future of Information Literacy in the Library: An Example of Librarian/Publisher Collaboration

ABSTRACT

As information sources have expanded, there have been parallel changes in the way students and researchers find and use that information. The role of the library has shifted to embedding information literacy skills into the curriculum as a primary function. This presentation explored how librarians are becoming more involved with information literacy curriculum and how publishers can assist them, particularly regarding access to information and the scholarly publishing process. Since 2015, Rebecca Donlan at Florida Gulf Coast University (FGCU) and Stacy Stanislaw at Taylor & Francis Group have been collaborating on an information literacy program for FGCU students and faculty that focuses specifically on navigating the scholarly publishing landscape. Donlan and Stanislaw provided an overview of the project, its formation, implementation, and progress to date.     

A subject librarian's pedagogical path in the digital humanities

ABSTRACT

As academic libraries evolve with digital humanities scholarship, subject librarians may find themselves teaching in this new pedagogical landscape before colleagues with digital humanities expertise arrive on their campus. The author provides a practical pedagogical path specifically for the subject librarian for planning, providing instruction, and evaluating a course with a significant digital humanities component. An examination of an English course is offered in addition to a detailed background of the challenges and opportunities encountered in revisiting information literacy pedagogy through student-led projects in digital humanities.     

GIS and the humanities: Presenting a path to digital scholarship with the Story Map app

ABSTRACT

Working collaboratively, a scholarly resources librarian and a subject liaison librarian at a small, public liberal arts college have created a GIS story mapping workshop for fellow information professionals. Using GIS, the librarians are bridging the gap between humanities and sciences in a liberal arts environment. The librarians' experience of being introduced to GIS and creating training for others enabled them to support their library's data services and digital scholarship initiatives. By helping connect the humanities with science and technology using story maps, librarians can create a neutral environment for learners to conduct interdisciplinary research and develop spatial literacy.     

Libraries and Faculty Collaboration: Four Digital Scholarship Examples

ABSTRACT

About twenty years ago, the Internet began to change the way people create, access, publish, and share information. The impact of this information revolution has been felt in every industry. For instance, the Internet has enabled new models in the publishing sector, which has subsequently impacted education and changed the landscape of teaching and learning. About a decade ago, the introduction of new buzzwords such as open access, electronic publishing, digital humanities, and digital scholarship continued to challenge the scholarly production and dissemination of knowledge. Undoubtedly, these changes also created new opportunities for collaboration among multidisciplinary groups including researchers, scholars, students, technologists, librarians, and others. In this article, the author discusses four successful faculty-driven digital scholarship projects that his library system has supported in the last two years. His team's work serves as an example of how academic libraries and centers for digital scholarship at undergraduate institutions can support digital humanities and digital scholarship initiatives. Additionally, the case examples can contribute to the ongoing discussion of new roles for librarians and technologists in working with scholars and students to gain the skills necessary to implement digital scholarship projects.     

Periodizations and History of Science

Abstract

The significance of historical periodizations is explored for the purpose of collection development. As historians often rely upon utilizing historical periods for discussion and research in their scholarship, an understanding of the nature of historical periods as a collection perspective and approach can be useful for the subject librarian engaged in or responsible for the history of science collections. An examination of the last 20 years of ISIS bibliographies using historical periods as a chronological tool provides useful framework and knowledge for research, scholarship, and collection management, especially selection for library collections, of the history of science. Data revealed periodizations and their emphases, evolution over time, and possible scholarly directions, pertinent for collection purposes. Informed knowledge of periodizations and how they may affect collections, acquisitions, and instruction enables librarians to effectively interact with the specialists in the history of science.     

FROM THE EDITOR

ABSTRACT

To commemorate the 150th anniversary of their institution, Illinois State University librarians are developing an online bibliography of scholarly works by campus faculty. The bibliography will be a permanent, searchable record of campus scholarship from 1857 to the present. The bibliography is intended to serve the needs of researchers interested in the history of the institution as well as the changing roles of college faculty over the last 150 years. The project is an alternative to and potential foundation for an institutional repository. The authors describe their experiences with the project and their plans for its expansion and enhancement. doi:10.1300/J106v14n03_01     

Reviewing Digital Scholarship: The Need for Discipline-Based Peer Review

ABSTRACT

Digital scholarship connects scholarly research to students and the public in nontraditional ways. Authors present research in a digital form, which may include links to primary source material and teaching guides. In this format, design and accessibility are important, and, unfortunately, those quick to dismiss all digital work as teaching or outreach can overlook the research element. The confusion over what digital scholarship is and how to evaluate it can affect promotion and tenure decisions in academic institutions. This article will examine issues surrounding the availability of peer review for digital scholarship, especially in the field of American history. Mechanisms for peer review must be created by scholarly associations and applied to digital scholarship to ensure this form of scholarship is acknowledged and rewarded.     

Project management for digital projects with collaborators beyond the library

ABSTRACT

Librarians are increasingly embracing project management to guide their work outside of routine library operations. Some humanities scholars, too, especially within the digital humanities community, are bringing project management techniques to bear on scholarly digital projects. We argue that librarians and their diverse collaborators can apply project management practices to a broad range of research, teaching, and learning projects with collaborators beyond the library. Two case studies illustrate this argument, one from each author's experience: creating a community biodiversity wiki for West-Central Florida and redesigning an interdisciplinary first-year seminar around creating 3-D models of historic Venetian buildings.     

Creating Opportunities: Embedded Librarians

ABSTRACT

Embedded librarianship focuses on the user and brings the library and the librarian to the user, wherever they are—office, laboratory, home, or even on their mobile device. This article provides an overview of the various ways libraries and librarians are embedding themselves into research and learning environs. Several roles are highlighted, including course-integrated instruction librarians as members of research teams, librarians collaborating with faculty in scholarly communication activities and librarians as partners in multidisciplinary, global, and virtual collaborations. Definitions of key terms precede the overview and provide context; consideration of the human resources side of the equation follows. Reflections on organizational structure conclude the article.     

Dialectic: The Aims of Institutional Repositories

ABSTRACT

In the early 2000s, Clifford Lynch and Raym Crow had two different visions for the future of institutional respositories. Using their works as a starting point, T. Scott Plutchak discussed the initial aims of institutional respositories and addressed the dialectic between the view of institutional repositories as providing a method of preserving and nurturing new forms of scholarly communication and that of the institutional repository as a mechanism to transition to Open Access models for scholarly publications. Plutchak concludes that institutional repository librarians should focus efforts on collecting and preserving material outside of the formal publishing program in order to advance the work of our institutions, and to advance what libraries can do.     

Beginning the Conversation: Discussing Scholarly Communication

Since the earliest scholarly journals began, journal literature answered a need to communicate scholarly and scientific findings and preserve a validated scholarly record of accomplishments and areas for further research. Scholars are profoundly interested in the transformation of scholarship and the implications for their disciplines. Librarian expertise within the digital serials realm and partnering with faculty to prioritize learning in the library will imaginatively create opportunities for learning with library resources. Discussing scholarly communication changes and traditions provides excellent common ground for serials librarians to begin conversations with disciplinary faculty.     

Pests,Welcomed Guests,or Tolerated Outsiders?

Abstract

Librarians are seeing increasing numbers of distance students from other institutions using proximal library facilities for their research. Academic librarians were surveyed to learn more about their attitudes toward these unaffiliated distance students. The 107 responses to the survey found that, overall, academic librarians reflected a service attitude. Few expressed overtly hostile attitudes, but there were concerns about the strains unaffiliated distance students put on their libraries' resources and services.     

Taking Library Instruction into the Online Classroom: Best Practices for Embedded Librarians

ABSTRACT

The proliferation of online courses has led librarians to adapt their instructional techniques and follow teaching faculty and students into the online environment. Moving beyond Web pages and online research guides, librarians are now becoming instructional partners in online course management systems. Through an online survey of librarians and a literature review, the authors examine best practices for these “embedded librarians.”     

Impact of embedded librarianship on undergraduate nursing students’ information skills

Background:One-shot library sessions have numerous drawbacks; most notably, they rarely have a long-term impact on students’ research behavior or skill sets. Library literature notes that when students interact with an embedded librarian, their skills improve. While close partnerships with subject faculty are important, librarians must also assess students’ skill sets to determine the impact of these teaching efforts.Case presentation:During the course, the embedded librarian used various activities and assignments to teach information-seeking skills, with the expected outcome of increased skill sets. This IRB-approved research project focused on measuring and assessing students’ information-seeking abilities before and after interacting with the embedded nursing librarian. Changes in students’ information fluency skills were measured using pre- and post-tests.Conclusions:The study results provide evidence of the benefits of the embedded librarianship model. Continued measurement of students’ skills acquisition is important to enable librarians and library administrators to show the positive impacts the library has on student learning and success.     

Collaborating in Research: Embedded Librarianship in the Learning Management System

Academic librarians engage students in the learning management system to provide information literacy instruction and answer individual reference questions related to scholarly research. When collaborating with faculty, embedded librarians deliver the library’s authoritative electronic resources to students working on research projects. Trends in academic publishing and technological innovations make possible online search for a generation reliant on mobile devices. Although students are able to access much digital content available through academic libraries and open access initiatives, they still appreciate guidance from embedded librarians who visit their learning management system courses to explain the complexities of scholarly research and suggest solutions.     

University press publishing and the ecology of disciplinary fluidity: General observations

Academic book and journal publishing constitutes the majority focus of university presses. Besides commercial scholarly publishers, academic scholars and researchers view the opportunities provided by university presses as important venues for the dissemination of their research. This discussion focuses on the disciplinary imperative to publish scholarship that is ever more fluid and specialized as academic disciplines continue to become further nuanced in their response to the increasing knowledge produced by humanities and social science inquiry. The focus is on university presses and not commercial scholarly presses, although constitute a significant locus of scholarly publishing. What are the general characteristics of academic specialization and university press publishing? Further, how is disciplinary fluidity, especially evolving specialization, reflected in university press book publishing nomenclature and how scholarship is tied to the intellectual preoccupations of academic specialization? Multi- and inter-disciplinarities further articulate disciplinary publishing, accelerating disciplinary fluidity. Examples from disciplinary and emerging configurations of disciplinary nomenclature utilized by university presses offers insight into specialization and publishing. Academic history publishing is used to illustrate newly emerging fluid disciplinary configurations.     

Open Access Publishing in Business Research: The Authors’ Perspective

Open access (OA) publishing is now accepted as an integral part of the emerging trends within scholarly communication. Business librarians, like their subject specialist colleagues in other disciplines, are increasingly called upon to interpret scholarly communication trends to their faculty. This study surveys 1,293 business faculty from American schools of business accredited by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business. Issues explored include business faculty publishing practices within the discipline and how these affect academic advancement, obtaining articles for their own research, electronic publishing, self-archiving, and their perceptions about OA publishing generally.