62 · Survey Results: Survey Questions and Responses
work to be done. The latter are testimonials of the value of new services/initiatives and help identify areas of work
needing adjustments.
Librarians are members of the campus’s Digital Arts &Humanities Initiative.
Libraries’ Center for Digital Scholarship now houses and acts as interface point for staff who engage in the creation of
these collections.
Members of a number of departments have been working with campus faculty to integrate digital materials from local
collections into course assignments. The Oklahoma Oral History Research Program in particular has collaborated with
faculty on the use of its current collections in courses but has also worked with classes to generate new digital materials
for its holdings. (Examples include the departments of Art and Theatre, the Public History Program, and the College of
Education.)
New initiatives like the NEH Shared Horizons program raised awareness of our digital collections and provided a
forum for exploring ways that our digital resources could be used for scholarship and data analysis. Other digital
scholarship and data curation efforts have used our collections to explore nuances of disease outbreaks, geospatial
links in medical publishing, and other areas of research not possible without access to digital collections. The blog’s
active encouragement of contributions though guest posts of collaborators, scholars, researchers, and students using
the collection is a valuable outreach tool. Our National Digital Stewardship Resident has developed a thematic web
collection and has helped us to identify how we can collect websites and blogs relevant to the history of medicine.
Our digital humanities center is working with several large projects to integrate our locally curated collection into the
curriculum and has augmented the considerable outreach efforts of our Department of Rare Books, Special Collections,
and Preservation.
Our digital publishing activities use Purdue ePubs and PURR as the platform. Data curation services use PURR as the
platform, as well as eArchives.
Our university just hired a history professor with a specialty in digital scholarship. She met with our Digital Initiatives
Librarian before the start of her first semester of teaching, and incorporated our locally curated collections into her
syllabus as well as had her students create new digital content.
Plans are underway to create many new services in the digital humanities for faculty and graduate students, including a
scholarship center in the library.
Research projects that take advantage of our repository infrastructure use the same systems and tools as locally curated
digital collections, allowing the potential for cross-project discovery and reuse.
SobekCM supports digital collections as well as data curation, digital scholarship projects, digital publishing, and
Digital Humanities projects and activities. The Libraries frequently leverage the SobekCM infrastructure supporting the
digital collections for data curation, digital scholarship, digital publishing, and Digital Humanities projects and activities.
Because of the strong centralized infrastructure, the libraries are able to support these new activities as part of the
regular Curator and Collection Manager duties, and are able to add new technological supports for new activities as
first-of-kind supports, instead of one-of-kind, which again improves the centralized infrastructure for all involved and
which supports the libraries as the central connecting hub and community for collaborative work and for new activities
with digital scholarship.
Support for digital humanities, digital scholarship, and digital publishing are all within the unit in place since 2006 that
has until recently had as its main focus support for a range of digital projects, from simple to sophisticated DH projects,
some internally driven, most faculty-driven. In all these areas, the development of the digital project, resource, journal
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