Category Archives: Conference

LANE (Latin American Northeast) Library Consortium Fall meeting

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Poster of exhibit at El Barrio Museum, Manhattan. Posters reads: Marisol pops New York!

Picture taken at El Barrio Museum in Manhattan (not taken during the LANE meeting but after Christmas. I just thought it looks good with the post)

As the UConn representative to LANE, twice during the academic year, I attend the LANE meetings, where we meet to discuss issues, concerns and share information regarding the acquisition of Latin American, Caribbean and Spanish (Spain) materials for our libraries. We meet each autumn for a whole day meeting, usually in NYC, and at the SALALM Annual meeting when we meet for a smaller meeting.

This last fall, we met at the Bobst Library at New York University. We have a very busy schedule and several guest speakers. The highlight of the meeting was the discussion on ebooks and streaming options for Spanish materials and a demo of new streaming product, Digitalia Film Library.

At this point, options are still limited and business models are still in flux in the Spanish language world (and the same can be said about other foreign languages options for ebooks and streaming films). After our discussion, we realized that although it is a good sign that there are several players entering the Spanish language ebooks market (e.g. Digitalia in Spain, Casalini in Italy(1), and Ventara in Argentina) and one new player in the streaming film market (Digitalia), the whole marketplace is still in its early infancy and there are issues that need to be improved. For example, for ebooks, we are still seeing DRM ebooks; clunky interfaces, and streaming is still an emerging business. Although there is a good amount of Spanish (Spain) publishers represented in ebooks format, Latin American and Caribbean publishers are less represented and therefore the ebooks inventory is very limited—especially for academic-level books. The only vendors selling academic books from Latin American and the Caribbean to libraries are Ventara from Argentina, and Digitalia from Spain, who had made contracts with several academic presses in Latin America and the Caribbean (Chile, Colombia, Peru, Puerto Rico). Mexico does have an ebooks market but they are focusing more in popular titles than in academic ones. So far, Mexico doesn’t have a vendor(s) approaching US academic libraries to sell ebooks yet but it is a matter of times to see such a player enter the marketplace.

In the streaming film area, Digitalia is the only Spanish company offering streaming for libraries. The selection of films in this new product is decent and it’s still growing. One issue that we discussed was the fact that the films in this product do not have subtitles, which is an issue for most of us since students learning Spanish don’t necessarily have the skills to follow the dialogue of movies without subtitles.

Even though things are not perfect yet, it was noted by several librarians in the group that these vendors welcome feedback from LANE and SALALM librarians, and are open to explore new business models, and improve their products to appeal to the US academic libraries’ market. One of the outcomes of our discussion was identifying these issues to be able to contact vendors and share our concerns with them to see if they will address them in the near future. We believe that if many of us share the same concerns with them, the possibility for these vendors to improve their products to make them more appealing to us will increase.

There were two guest’s presentations during the meeting. One by the librarians at the United Nations’ Dag Hammarskjold Library, in New York, who talked about the many free resources online available at their website (from statistics to reports from each of the many departments that comprised the United Nations), and a second presentation by the Library director and the bibliographer of the Museum of Modern Art Library, who talked about their amazing Latin American art collection available to researchers at both their NYC locations (Manhattan and Queens), at their website and at the Arcade, “the catalog of the New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC)”. One of the choices to search is “Latin American collections” which allow researches to search MoMA’s Latin American art collection.

All in all, a great day conference!

Next posting, Guadalajara’s International Book Fair!

Notes:

(1) Casilini’s Torrossa ebooks platform not only offer ebooks in Spanish but also in Italian, French and Portuguese.

Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Advisory Board Meeting and Conference

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Last October I attended the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Advisory Board Meeting and Biennial Conference: Prensa, Latinidad y Legado: Spanish-Language Press and Print Culture in Syracuse, NY.

The Recovery Project is “a national program based at the University of Houston that locates, identifies, preserves and disseminates the literary contributions of U.S. Hispanics from colonial times to 1960*”. This project was established in the 1990s by Nicholas Kanellos, “Brown Foundation Professor of Hispanic Studies and director of both Arte Público Press and the Recovery Project.*” The people involves with the Recovery Project feel very strongly about making sure that the documentary evidence of Hispanics in the United States don’t get lost or destroy because of lack of institutional or financial support at the state and federal level. This project was started in the 1990s because many Hispanics felt at the time that there were few ethnic archives supported by archival institutions (either private or state institutions), especially those interested in acquiring and preserving materials that documented the long history of the presence of Hispanic in the what it is known today as the United States. At the time, private funding was plentiful and they were able not only to create the first newspapers’ union catalog that track Hispanic newspapers from the XIXth century to the 1960s but later on to find, acquire and microfilmed many of these newspapers to make them accessible to researchers. Through a partnership with Readex* this collection was digitized and made available online as a product from which the Recovery Project gets royalties that they then reinvest to continue acquiring, cataloging and preserving these materials. After the success with Hispanic newspapers, they extended the project to include archival collections such as personal papers of distinguish Hispanic American involved in the civil rights movement. These collections of rare newspapers and archival collections that they acquired are now available at the University of Houston Hispanic Collection archives.

After 9/11 in 2001, funding for this kind of project has diminished and the Recover Project decided to partner with EBSCO to digitize and make available these new materials (pamphlets, books, newspapers, images, manuscripts, etc.) through a new product, The Latino-Hispanic American Experience: The Arte Público Hispanic Historical Collection** (Part 1 and 2) as a way to generate royalties that again are reinvested into the project to continue their works.

Every two years, as members of the Advisory Board, we meet to discuss Recovery current projects and new projects and this year the main discussion was to decide new directions for the Recovery project, in specific, to extend the time period for acquisition of materials from 1960 to 1990. Although we didn’t achieve a final consensus about the extension, there were many good discussions on why it is important to find sustainable ways to acquire, preserve and give access to materials that document the cultural heritage of Hispanic people in the United States after the 1960s especially considering the arrival of the Internet and the Web, electronic media and social media networks.

After the Advisory Board meeting, as board members we support the biennial conference as moderators of panels. I had the pleasure to moderate the panel: “Pedagogy, Research and Archives”. The panelists, Dr. Enrique Mallén, director and general editor of the On-line Picasso Project, https://picasso.shsu.edu/, Caryl Ward, subject librarian for Latin American Studies at Binghamton University, and Lisa Cruces, archivist of the newly created Hispanic Collections at University of Houston, talked about how to incorporate freely accessible digital collections, and archival collections into the teaching and research of Hispanic American print and media culture. A variety of challenges were discussed such as insufficient financial support and/or staffing, changing technologies, and quality of scanning, but all panelists agreed that it is worth the effort to make primary sources available freely to complement what is behind pay walls. They also emphasized the important to establish collaborations between librarians, archivists and faculty to make sure that their classes benefit from materials both found online and offline (in the archives).

Another panel that I attended of great interests to librarians and faculty alike was the presentation done by the library staff at Syracuse University which regaled us with three great presentations of the many hidden treasures that document Hispanic literary culture in the United States. For example, Brett Michael Barrie, Rare Book Cataloger and Lucy Mulroney, Interim Director of Special Collections shared their experience of processing donations that document the relationship between a NYC independent press (Grove Press) and many Latin American writers such as Octavio Paz, Juan Rulfo and Pablo Neruda (and the correspondence between editors, translators and writers) about the translation of these writers works into English; and a Spanish professor’s book collection that documented  relationships between major writers from Latin America and Spain during the 20th century.

There were many other panels during the conference that I couldn’t attend but some of the ones I attended were for example one on the research documenting the presence of Dominican(s) in New York City, one example was the case of Juan Rodriguez, who was in New Amsterdam (today New York City) in 1613– while another focused on the strong presence of Cubans in New York city prior of 1898, especially the presence of Cuban Independence champion, José Martí. Other panels focused on the struggles of Mexican American in the United States after the Mexican-American War as documented in newspapers and personal correspondence. Much of the research done and discussed in this conference came from materials found by the Recovery project and available through Readex or EBSCO.

As a final note to this post, EBSCO did a presentation about Series II of the Arte Público collection and acknowledged that because missteps from their parts it hasn’t sold as well as series I. Part of the reason is that many libraries are unable or unwilling to pay the price set by them since it is too high and it used the whole FTE of an university regardless if only a fraction of the registered students would ever used this resource. Therefore EBSCO is considering for their pricing scheme to use instead something called relative FTE that account better the actual potential usage based on the departments and their student body size, instead of all the students at a particular university. So there is hope not only with this Arte Publico product but other primary sources products to be priced on a more reasonable way so more university can acquire it for their faculty and students.

Overall, this was a very worthy conference to attend and I am happy to be part of the advisory board of this commendable project. In 2016 is the 25th anniversary of the project which I hope to attend.

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Digital Frontiers 2014

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[This is an abbreviated post based on the original, which is found here: http://www.annakijas.com/digital-frontiers-2014/]

I have just returned from Digital Frontiers 2014, a conference at Texas Woman’s University in Denton, Texas where I had the pleasure of spending two days with a wonderfully diverse crowd of people representing K-12 education, higher education, academic/public libraries, and museums. I was invited to participate in a panel on Digital Humanities in Music for which I gave a talk on “Open Access and Geo-Spatial Tools in (Music) Research.”  Continue reading →

Digital Humanities Summer Institute (June 2014)

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(This is an abbreviated version of my original post, which can be accessed on my blog.) 

This was my first time attending the Digital Humanities Summer Institute at the University of Victoria, the first of what I hope will be one of many to come. The purpose of this institute is to introduce and train scholars, students, librarians, and other professionals in the humanities, as well as other disciplines, to new computing tools and methodologies through an intensive, week-long training period.

I enrolled in the Understanding Topic Modeling course, led by Neal Audenaert a Senior Software Engineer (Texas A & M University, Texas Center for Applied Technology). This course introduced participants to the algorithms, models, and theories used in Topic Modeling, specifically LDA (latent dirichlet allocation), and a variety of topic models that can provide different understandings of your data, such as modeling topics over time (dynamic topic modeling). I’ll discuss my class experience in greater detail in a future post with examples of the material we covered during this course and some of the data that I worked with. In this post, I will provide a brief overview of my experience and discuss some of the projects, tools, and discussions, which interested me while at DHSI.

What I really liked about DHSI is that it differs from other institutes in that discussion and learning occurs through a community-based approach. Archivists, programmers, librarians, software engineers, faculty, students (etc, etc.) all work and learn together. It is a week-long exchange of knowledge and ideas where we can  ask questions, re-think our own approaches to how we do research in our own disciplines through the use of computational tools and methods, which are being applied in digital humanities. Many of these tools and methods are borrowed or built-upon from areas outside of the humanities–social science, computer science, mathematics–we then think about their application in our own specific disciplines or fields, such as the application of topic modeling on textual data drawn from nineteenth-century music periodicals, which can then show us the trends in music reception, performance, trade, or influence.

During the week at DHSI, participants spent the large portion of each day in their courses, however each day opened with a morning colloquium, in which participants presented their current projects or research, as well as asked for feedback on projects that were in the pre-development stage. These were presented in five-minute intervals (lightning talks) and demonstrated the diversity of approaches, tools, and methods, but also intersections between disciplines or fields. Following the daily classes were Birds of a Feather discussions (#DHSIbof), in which two speakers reflected on the same topic, providing different perspectives before opening the conversation to the audience for discussion and reflection.

The morning colloquia represented a variety of disciplinary areas, including literary studies, history, archaeology, information science, social science, feminist studies, cultural studies, medieval studies, and sound studies. Tools or methods applied or explored for possible application included geo-spatial and temporal analyses, TEI (text encoding using XML and XSLT), database frameworks, web-design, game design/theory, and critical editing. There were a number of projects with a focus on text analysis, as well as textual encoding. For example, Douglas Duhaime (University of Notre Dame) presented on “New Approaches to Digital Text Analysis: Introducing the Literature Online API,” in which he discussed his reason for building an API that would query the Literature Online (ProQuest) subscription database. Another interesting project was “On the Page, On the Screen: Uncovering the Digital Lives of Readers Using Linguistics, Temporal, and Geospatial Analysis” presented by Anouk Lang (U Strathclyde) in which she is studying reading patterns of contemporary readers by examining their literary activity through online reviews and social media comments. She is applying topic modeling to the data that she has been able to pull from various sites, as well as using temporal and geo-spatial analysis tools so that she can see changes in readership over time.

Attending DHSI afforded me the opportunity to reconnect with several colleagues and meet others for the first time, who will now become my colleagues. Attending the week-long course, colloquia, and Birds of a Feather discussions was wonderful in and of itself, because these various interactions allowed me to expand my own approaches and thinking about existent projects, such as Documenting Teresa Carreño, forthcoming projects, and possibilities for application in the library. Outside of these planned events were opportunities to make new colleagues and interact on a non-hierarchical level with graduate students, librarians, programmers, academic administrators, and scholars, which created a non-threatening environment in which everyone was encouraged to interact and learn from one another. DHSI was a truly energizing experience, opening up new paths of inquiry for many, as well as reinforcing an intersecting and cross-disciplinary social network that we can always connect with and hopefully collaborate with on future projects. Next year’s DHSI is already being planned with dates in June 8 – 12, 2015. DHSI conversations were archived by Ernesto Priego (City University, London) and can be found here: Digital Humanities Summer Institute 2014: A #dhsi2014 Archive. figshare.

Where’s the Money? @ the Social Sciences Librarian Bootcamp

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Presenter: Karen Downing, Head, Social Sciences; Foundation Center at the University of Michigan

I had the opportunity to attend Downing’s session on grant support entitled “Where’s the Money: Best Practices for Providing Grant-Seeking Services in the Social Sciences”.

According to Downing, librarians should begin by getting an understanding of the grants scene on their campus.

First, be aware of stakeholders on campus who may become partners for resource purchases and sharing; examples include the research office, development office, and medical school administrators. Next, librarians should identify the grant-seekers on campus. If possible, get a list of grant proposals and awards (University of Michigan offers theirs as a publically available search engine). In addition, obtain usage statistics on funder databases such as COS Pivot. With these pieces of information, identify gaps in proposal success and gaps in database usage. Downing also recommends getting to know faculty that have served on grant juries.

Downing did an assessment of faculty views on grant-seeking at the University of Michigan. She made two interesting discoveries: grant-seeking support was uneven across the university and interdisciplinary projects readily received funding but were difficult to manage. These discoveries may assist librarians when they are determining a niche for their services.

During the presentation Downing showed two pie charts from the Foundation Center which showed which subjects receive the most funding from private foundations and charities. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the largest chunks of funding went to the health sciences, human services, and public affairs.

To help researchers locate funding, Downing discussed two resources she recommends: COS Pivot and the Foundation Directory Online. According to Downing, the two resources complement one another. COS Pivot’s strength is in its coverage of US federal grants and international grant resources, while the Foundation Directory has good coverage of private funding sources.

For librarians without access to these subscription-only databases, the Foundation Center’s general website (foundationcenter.org) is a useful alternative. The site features a free index of grant providers, sample grant proposals, and annual reports from various foundations.

Social Sciences Library Bootcamp 2014

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In June, I attended the Social Sciences Librarian Bootcamp at Harvard Business School. The first part of the camp was dedicated to panels of faculty and graduate students discussing current research projects they have been working on and how library resources and staff helped them along the way.  I didn’t think anything surprising came out of the panel discussions: some researchers used archival resources, some find the library useful for data management issues, and some used librarians’ expertise to track down hard-to-find resources needed for their projects.  I found the presentation of their papers to be extremely interesting, especially the faculty panel on the theme of food.  But this was more for the subject material than for how libraries and librarians contributed to the research.

After lunch, the sessions began.  The first session I attended was one on the Boston Census Research Data Center.  There are 18 RDCs in the country, and these RDCs charge a fee for scholars to come in and use the census data that is not released publicly.  HBS pays the lab fees for all faculty, staff, and students at Harvard.  Researchers can submit proposals for their research, stating what data they would like to see and why their research cannot be done with only the publicly available material.  To begin the proposal process, researchers can contact the closest RDC.  For us, the Boston one is currently the closest location, but Yale will be establishing an RDC next year.  The website is www.census.gov/ces/main/contact.html.

The presenter gave several examples of research that had been completed using data at the RDC.  These include the effect on property values in neighborhoods near plants; what firms export where; the decision of firms to go public; and the effect of social networks on hiring and work patterns.

The second session I attended was one on the historical collections at HBS.  This was particularly interesting to me as the history librarian.  The records at HBS document business history from the late 1300s-today.  The collections consist of a print collection, the HBS Archives, the manuscript collection, and the Polaroid Collection.

The manuscript collection is where you can find much of the most unique material.  This collection includes over 1500 series from the 14th century to the present.  Many records related to colonial and early republican business records in New England are housed here, including a vast amount of material related to 19th-century whaling.  One of the graduate students (a PhD candidate at Yale) in the morning’s panel had used the R. G. Dun credit reports extensively for her dissertation on credit history.  These reports are the most commonly used material in the HBS historical collections.

The Polaroid Collection is a new acquisition and is the largest collection at HBS.  This collection includes administrative records, patent history, research and development records, photographs, prototype photos, advertisement photos, and an AV component.  It is not yet fully accessible as the staff are still processing this very large collection.

The Social Sciences Librarians Bootcamp is a conference that I find worthwhile.  There is plenty of opportunities to learn about resources that are out there, especially the freely accessible ones.  Also, it is a great place to network with other librarians in the greater Boston area who are dealing with many of the same issues we are at UConn.  I would recommend this conference to anyone interested.