Meanwhile, working with her hourly students and graduate assistant, Angela developed an extensive genre vocabulary that will be used to classify the works included in the VWWP, based on the Modern Language Association International Bibliography genre terms. She wanted to make the database browsable and searchable by genre, and also wanted the genre list to be as detailed as possible, considerably more complex than prose, poetry, and drama. What was the outcome of Angela’s work? The English Department now recognizes the importance of digital humanities literacy to its graduate students, and there is little doubt this recent shift in thinking is due in large part to Angela’s interactions with the department and to the revitalization of the VWWP. Recently, interested parties in the department created a digital humanities e-mail list and began a digital humanities seminar series, and Angela was included as part of this initiative. The class mentioned above will include readings and discussion of the theoretical underpinnings of the digital humanities as well as practical sessions on advanced scholarly text encoding as set out by the Text Encoding Initiative.11 Students will encode texts for the VWWP, and they will also create secondary contextualizing materials for texts including introductions, bibliographies, and timelines. Angela will co-teach this class with a faculty member and they describe the class as “a hands-on, practical class squarely aimed at investigating the expanding field of the digital humanities as they impact and intersect with literary studies, with regard to key activities and skills of our scholarly lives, current and future: research, editing, teaching, and professional development.” The creation of the digital humanities course, the revitalization of the digital text project, and the faculty awareness of the importance of digital literacy for graduate students were all made possible because of Angela’s deep involvement with her colleagues in the English Department. This story illustrates a librarian who has gone beyond the typical subject specialist’s role. She truly collaborated with faculty in course development, teaching, and research. A second example comes from Carrie Donovan, Head, Teaching, and Learning, at IU Bloomington. Carrie was recently on a team of Indiana University faculty from the departments of sociology, anthropology, art, and astronomy who applied for and won a “Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Leadership” grant for their research regarding the use of visual methods as a learning tool central to teaching disciplinary concepts critical to student success. As part of the project, “How Can Visual Methods Enhance Teaching and RLI 272 13 Transforming Roles for Academic Librarians: Leading and Participating in New Partnerships ( C O N T I N U E D ) OCTOBER 2010 RESEARCH LIBRARY ISSUES: A BIMONTHLY REPORT FROM ARL, CNI, AND SPARC
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