As internal access to collections increases through collection management systems and as online publishing formats multiply, how do we work together within organizations to effectively “curate” content? What does it mean to curate?  How can different departments within organizations work together to bring material to the public? This may be the “looking-in” version of Michael’s proposal!

Three Government Documents Librarians want to share a few things about the nexus of  government information, technology, and the humanities.  Yes, the feds have gone all-out-techie and have developed many online resources to help citizens find information on everything from basic e-government applications to sophisticated research portals.  While much of what those sophisticated portals contain is science and technology oriented, the humanities have not been ignored.  Each librarian will discuss a specific type of digital government resource:  web portals that provide links to humanities topics; individual web sites sponsored by government organizations like the National Endowment for the Humanities; and, finally, mobile apps that can link citizens to collections of art, tours of the National Mall in DC (museums, landmarks, cherry blossoms, what more could you want?) and, for the children, an interactive version of a 1919 illustrated edition of Aesop’s Fables from the Library of Congress! If time permits, we will discuss the newest fed gov initiative, federal eBooks, to be made available through Government Printing Office (GPO) partnerships with Apple, Google, Barnes & Noble, and other vendors.

Our discussion will involve asking provocative questions–including those that address just how much interest there exists in having the government provide multiple technologies for accessing its information.  Another question will seek answers to the following:  how does the government’s  move to digital affect the legal and ethical demands for preservation of all government information?

As someone who has been using digital media (to qualify, rather erratically) in her research and teaching for many years, I am a bit of a lone wolf in an English Department that strictly adheres to traditional print culture in both scholarship and in the classroom. This session intends to pose a series of questions that will lead to some kind of action plan for dissolving fears and disdain of all things academic and digital.

My first question posed is: how can those of us who are digitally-oriented not only get support for e-projects and e-pedagogies (as Michael suggests in his proposal) that move beyond just a simple transference of media but move into the realm of re-conceiving what humanities can do in terms of methods and pedagogies? And what arguments can we make to persuade resistant faculty of the possibilities of digital media in their scholarship and teaching? How can we persuade faculty (especially in this age of budget cuts and education as instrumentalist rhetoric) that indeed some digital tools may offer to re-engage us with our subjects in novel and dynamic ways as well as energize our teaching?

Secondly, what digital programs and tools would best serve particular departments and/or disciplines as a whole? What tools can we bring to our departments via professional development workshops (taken for service credit) that would be most amenable and accessible to resistant faculty? Whether Omeka or Drupal for digital literary projects/archives or Mendeley/Zotero/Udini for research/data collecting.

Third, I’ve been thinking about starting a Digital Humanities Working Group or University-Wide Committee that could begin to think through implementing the digital in our work as scholars and teachers and to create sustainable collaborative relations with folks in library and computer science. I would like to hear from people who may be doing this and what they have learned and frankly whether this kind of college-wide effort is worth undertaking.

There is already a session about faculty with little or no web training, but that underlies this too.  I am actually trying to build two websites:  one for the 50th Anniversary of the Desegregation of Tulane; and one for the 1811 Louisiana Slave Revolt.  The latter is in the context of a class.  Both have some progress already.  Ideally, we want a high level of academically vetted history content, scanned documents; and on both sites access to video–on the desegregation website that will be oral history interviews (or maybe edited versions thereof with subsidiary links to full interviews); while on both sites we will have event footage.  My experience in both cases so far has been, because no one has a real budget or time for much professional training, whoever volunteers with pretty good web skills does what they can.  The end results are not bad; but there has got to be way to do this smoother and with more best-practices especially for the historical material–my big concern–good ways to present things like timelines and images; and useful ways to present scanned materials, but for the visual interest of the public, and perhaps for future researchers.  Putting up designed-to-be-permanent major history websites like this should have some best-practices goals/ideas/standards, beyond ‘what we can do with our limited professional skills and financial and professional resources.

I am interested in discussing how faculty members who receive no training or support can develop sites and online archives to promote their research and create online communities. Much of my research has been invested in the recovery of forgotten or under-appreciated authors. As the President of a society devoted to research on an under-appreciated author, I am interested in creating an online archive of the author’s works as well as archival material for use by researchers, teachers, and students. I have seen a few useful models on line, which I could present. One model was created in part by Ed White at Tulane. He is not able to attend the conference, but I have discussed the project with him and can share some of his experience. His site was created with WordPress with support from the American Antiquarian Society.

I would like to host a session on Zotero, an open source reference management application. In the session, I will explain what Zotero is, and provided a brief tutorial on how to setup, create and manage your Zotero account. I would also like to have a discussion on what free tools or resources others are implementing in their courses or on campus.

It’s everywhere. Every library or museum of a certain size seems to have digital collections in it. You can’t escape it. It’s CONTENTdm!

But is that a bad thing?

In this session, I’d like to talk/share/commiserate with other CONTENTdm users on some of the challenges and opportunities offered by the new version, particularly in regards to digital humanities projects and supporting those who are doing them. I’m still a relative newcomer to the software, and I’m excited by some of the things I see other users doing with it, but I’m frustrated, too, by some of my day-to-day problems with it. I imagine others feel the same.

I’m also intrigued by the software’s roots at the University of Washington circa 1999 and how it became the proprietary commercial juggernaut that it is today. I wonder what will become of tools like Omeka, DSpace, Fedora, and others that some of us depend on today in fourteen years’ time.

I would like to know how others are supporting digital collection data growth and integrity. As a system and storage administrator, I’ve found it difficult to predict storage growth over time, especially within the confines of grant funding. I would also like to explore the pros and cons of hosted storage solutions with those who may have experiences to share.

I have been fortunate to attend a few THATCamps connected to academic conferences for historians, and I have wanted to work with others to create a THATCamp (and, we hope, a series of unconferences) rooted in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast region. UNO and USM folk from various backgrounds started to collaborate on digital projects several years ago via content development for the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, whose project funding birthed the precursor to Omeka. Therefore, we sought to begin the process of making connections and building a community that transcends the typical borders separating people engaged in digital projects.

One of the best features of THATCamps is their ability to facilitate interdisciplinary exchanges. The conversations that take place when librarians, archivists, museum curators, graduate students, K-12 faculty, public historians, humanities faculty, and others gather together are invaluable. I hope our first gathering will help us to develop a supportive community. I had the pleasure of teaching history and writing classes in a computer classroom starting in 1993 and presenting at Computers & Writing in 1997, so I know how much good comes from getting out of disciplinary ruts or sinkholes.

Maybe we will come up with some solutions to a few of the common problems facing most who work on noncommercial digital projects in the Deep South:

*lack of funding and/or the constant threat of losing meager funding sources;

*lack of administrative support, including attention to key issues such as time & labor & technical support; and

*lack of interest and/or respect for non-commercial digital work, regardless of whether it’s presented as “digital humanities” and if DH’s time as the latest academic fad may seem to have come (and gone).

The arrival of Gena Chattin and Jennifer Jackson on UNO’s campus in concert with the long-term interest shown by Jeanne Pavy and others at UNO as well as Jeanne Gillespie and Diane Ross on USM’s campus have served as the catalyzing energies that have allowed us to move forward. More recently, UNO’s History Department has partnered with Vicki Mayer in Tulane’s Communication Department for a mobile history (ios and Android or Google Play) project using omeka known as neworleanshistorical.org.

Let’s begin to collaborate to build a more effective DH community.