Project Bamboo: Second day, first session
Good chat over breakfast about the role of libraries in the research process, NEH grants in the digital humanities, Sophie and TK3 and NightKitchen (ah, the ebook days of yesteryear!), etc.
Judith Nadler, Library Director, University of Chicago Library. “The Library as Partner in Research and Scholarship: The Case of Bamboo.” On first reading the Project Bamboo proposal, thought it was a miracle: we could all see ourselves in it, and it was clear that the library could be deeply involved. Libraries have much to bring to Bamboo, and learn from it. The library brings a history of partnerships with scholars in building, describing, preserving, and serving information (key mission of the library!). Acquiring and selecting content, making spaces for storage and use of collections, involvement in mass digitization. Content management and digitization: describing and organizing, offering access, archiving and preserving. Service models: help desks, user education and instruction, faculty outreach and consultation.
Models of sharing and collaboration that may be helpful to Bamboo: coordinated collection development, interlibrary loan, shared physical storage, cooperative description, collaborative systems development (yeah, I’m not so sure about this one), collaborating with faculty.
Facing the future: exposing hidden collections, decentralizing resource-control and metadata creation (devolving some of it onto non-librarians because we can’t do it all), finding new collaborators (including via 2.0 approaches such as tagging), using new and emerging technologies better.
What we can learn from Bamboo: New roles for the library, e.g. are we just content repositories, or content validators? New tools and services we can offer (new collaborative tools). New content types (aside from the traditional publishing stream). New outreach models and services (e.g. IP expertise).
Biggest benefit of Bamboo: maximize the value of collective expertise! Instead of “build it, and they will come,” let’s “build it together.” (What a great formulation. I will be borrowing it. Often.) Too often, we’ve built and nobody’s come; this will be different.
(Agenda overview.)
Exercise: On a good day, what do you (as a humanities researcher) productively do in service of research? How about during a longer period of time (semester, term, year)?
(Great discussion at my table, but I’m holding out to participate rather than blogging.)