Gideon Burton's Blog

The Coming Change in Humanities Publishing (7): The Online Archive

So far in this series I have described two types of publishing we are going to see more of as the humanities (with the rest of academia) retool for the digital age: electronic publication of conventional scholarship, and Open Access publication. In this post, I discuss a third type of electronic publishing: the online archive. But wait a minute, you might say, archiving and publishing are very different things. Scholars publish; librarians archive. Right? Well, the lines have blurred, as has the very definition of what constitutes publishing today. But before discussing the changing nature of publishing, let me quickly define the online archive and sketch how it works.

Open Access meets Open Teaching in the Institutional Repository

At a presentation on Open Access to the Academic Vice President's Council at BYU last week we discussed changes in academic publishing and proposed moving toward a Open Access policy for this university comparable to Harvard's.

A key component of the Open Access movement is the rise of institutional and disciplinary repositories. While these are archives, their role will not be purely archival. A repository becomes a de facto publishing platform, and the publishing it will do will not be limited to republishing copies of scholarly articles that have first appeared elsewhere. An institutional repository will be a place where faculty can deposit their teaching materials. Open Access meets Open Teaching.

Meeting with HBLL library digital development group

I met today with members of the digital development committee in the HBLL library. Attending were Scott Eldredge, Susan Fales, Kayla Willey, and Jeff Belliston. Susan invited me to come to talk further about possibilities of introducing better two-way communication with library users (as I'd discussed in my meeting with the Mormon Studies Coordinating Committee). I proposed the use of various communication tools used in conjunction with one another (blogs, wikis, tagging, and social bookmarking) in an effort to focus less on organizing resources and more on organizing productive scholarly conversations (across resources). If subject librarians maintained blogs they could develop conversations around their specialities. If tagging or social bookmarking software was enabled across the library's various resources online, this could help to create communities among those working on similar projects (I used Diigo and StumbleUpon as good examples of social bookmarking). User-generated tags (which Scott showed us is in beta on some digital collections) could be used in conjunction with metadata to refine searching. I even suggested that tag clouds could  be considered as a quick method of knowing how a given resource (or subject matter) was being researched. The question of maintaining library blogs came up, which led to a discussion of involving non-library personnel (faculty, other specialists) to share the administration and maintenance of subject blogs. I'm convinced that library's must reconceive their role; rather than having the last say on the organization of knowledge (and the various taxonomies by which knowledge is ordered), they ought instead to accommodate and promote the development of social knowledge by providing the best means possible for users to find one another, share information intelligently, and add to a growing body of collective knowledge (as with wikis). Doing this will maximize the use of library resources and promote scholarly knowledge (as well as good public relations).

Metadata and Mormon Studies

As I work with librarians at BYU's Harold B. Lee Library in revising the Mormon Literature Database, and as I work with those on the media board of BYU Studies as we contemplate how best to do our online academic publishing, it is becoming more clear to me that those developing digital resources for the study of Mormonism would be wise to develop common metadata so that the data developed independently can be aggregatable. I haven't been quite sure how to go about that, but I feel much closer today following our weekly MLDB development meeting (attended by Janet Bradford, Ruth Eldredge, Jesse ____, and myself).

Bill Lund attended (head of IT for the library), and he educated us on how we could ready our database for a more meaningful interface with the web. After his explanations and some research I did after the meeting, I believe I now can better articulate to others the need for standard metadata within Mormon Studies. Something of a position paper now follows--perhaps the draft of a potential paper for a conference).

HBLL Mormon Studies Coordinating Committee

Today I attended the Mormon Studies Coordinating Committee in the Harold B. Lee Library to discuss ways in which we could better coordinate Mormon Studies both within the university and beyond.  (Those attending today: Scott Duvall, Susan Fales, Karen Griggs, Dale Swensen, Connie Lamb, Robert Means, Janet Bradford, Mike Hunter, and myself)