This essay suggests that there has been a relative lack of digitally enabled historical research on the recent past, when compared to earlier periods of history. It explores why this might be the case, focussing in particular on both the obstacles and some missing drivers to mass digitisation of primary sources for the 20th century. It suggests…[Read more]

Think back to your first year of college. How did you feel? Eager? Excited? Maybe also fearful, anxious about fitting in, making friends, or being successful? First-year students have a lot on their minds. It can be challenging to help them forge a meaningful connection with the library. Amidst the internal cacophony generated by the transition to…[Read more]

The interdisciplinary course Pink Noise: Women Making Electronic Music explores the hands-on creation of electronic music through the lens of feminist critical frameworks, activism, and collective action. Techniques and topics include composing with Texts, Activist Sound, Live Sampling and Delay, Turntablism, Soundscape Composition, the Occult…[Read more]

This presentation defines BEAM and discusses how the author introduced it in a graduate-level music bibliography course.

Open access has changed. At the beginning of the millennium, it was portrayed in a romanticizing way and was embedded in a conceptual ensemble of participation, democratization, digital commons and equality. Nowadays, open access seems to be exclusive: to the extent that commercial players have discovered it as a business model and article fees…[Read more]

As cultural heritage collections become available online they carry the promise of ‘access’ – new audiences, new uses, new understandings. But access is never simply open. Limits are imposed, structures are defined, categories are created. Decisions are made about what gets digitised and why. This chapter will describe a series of exper…[Read more]

The process of managing information in architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) design projects remained relatively unchanged between publication of works of Bavarian theorist Albrecht Dürer and French mathematician Gaspard Monge in the 1500s and 1700s respectively, and the widespread adoption of computer aided design (CAD) in the early…[Read more]

Der Markt für wissenschaftliche Informationen hat in den letzten Jahrzehnten einen enormen Konzentrationsprozess durchlaufen, und zwar nicht nur was Publikationen, sondern Produkte des gesamten akademischen Workflows betrifft. Dies könnte am Ende zu einem „end-to-end lock-in” führen. Sowohl um dieser Entwicklung etwas entgegenzusetzen als auch…[Read more]

Given the unique cultural artifacts and ephemera contained in music libraries, music librarians spend much of our time concerned with the description of materials that fall outside the mainstream expectations of descriptive cataloging. Such diverse objects include dance manuals, record carriers, magazines, posters, and other promotional materials.…[Read more]

Shared productivity applications like Google Docs have become commonplace in libraries, but there are many other free, web-based resources that librarians can use for staff management and collaboration. Library staff at BGSU have been using applications such as Dropbox, Hiveminder, and Floorplanner, as well as many others, for such tasks. We will…[Read more]

Social justice and critical theory frameworks have been utilized to discuss library pedagogy and cataloging, but librarians have been slow in applying critical theory to how we actually manage libraries and lead staff. Management is not glamorous; rather, many still hold the traditional view of management as upholding hierarchical values. At its…[Read more]

Librarians have been publicly voicing dissent towards neutrality since at least the 1980s, when a number of radical librarians coming out of the climate of social upheaval in the 1960s-1970s began to call for a re-examination of the idea of library neutrality (Dick 220). Individuals on the margins have been writing on this topic for decades, but…[Read more]

Profiling the Samuel Becket collection at the University of Reading

In late January 2017 conversations began on the Music Library Association (MLA) listserv about data rescue. These conversations were primarily inquiries to see if anyone on the MLA-L was aware of data archiving or rescue efforts underway for vulnerable performing arts and music data on government websites. As a digital scholarship librarian whose…[Read more]

In this presentation, we provide an overview of the contents and development of The Séamus Connolly Collection of Irish Music, a recently-launched open access collection of over 330 tunes and songs. The audio, sheet music, stories, and essays can be viewed and/or listened to on mobile devices, tablets, and computers. Through Omeka and SoundCloud,…[Read more]

Libraries are always entangled in their cultures, and that means American libraries have always interacted with, adopted, and at the same time resisted capitalist assumptions about human behavior. We will explore that fraught relationship by looking at the past, and in particular looking at moments when some of the core values we so often fail to…[Read more]

This handout was presented as a take away for a workshop at MLA TechCamp 2018. This workshop will provide an overview of fair use as it applies to digital projects. It will particularly benefit anyone planning, attempting to fund (via a grant), or currently managing a digital project that is aimed at providing access to made-digital or…[Read more]