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]

This article explores the interface of multiple legal systems in early modern Daghestan. By comparing colonial engagements with legal plurality with indigenous genres of Daghestani legal discourse, I aim to shed light on the plurality of legal systems that preceded as well as informed legal discourse under colonialism. The Daghestani turn to…[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]

This chapter uses Our Marathon: The Boston Bombing Digital Archive to consider the ways that collaborative, public-facing digital humanities initiatives can conflict with institutional conventions and methods of evaluating academic labor. Collaborative work creates challenges as well as opportunities for its organizers and laborers. The particular…[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

Discussion of the historiography of the reception of Edward Yang’s film and the specificity of it in terms of documenting Cold War Taipei, a tightly surveilled city torn and its emergence as a modern city with a critique of Fredric Jameson’s reading of the film.

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]

The Wellcome Library, in considering a project to digitise and transcribe recipe manuscripts using crowdsourcing technologies, commissioned this report from Ben Brumfield and Mia Ridge in Summer 2015. The report addresses issues specific to this project, and to the Wellcome Library’s digital infrastructure.

The purpose of this study is to explore whether the current UK legislation on orphan works, in the form of an EU exception and an orphan works license scheme, is effective in enabling the mass digitization of orphan works by cultural heritage organisations. The research covers the barriers faced by cultural heritage organisations wishing to…[Read more]

The purpose of the study was to capture a brief snapshot of current academic librarian engagement with Open Access in UK higher education institutions. The study utilised a mixed method approach. An online questionnaire was used to capture quantitative data, and email interviews were used to collect qualitative data. A volunteer sample of 83…[Read more]

The centenary of World War I has marked an abrupt change: historical events will never be commemorated in the same way, especially in Belgium. The federated entities have demonstrated the autonomous role which they intend to play in future events of this type. The Brussels-Capital Region was not outdone. While the political choice to be directly…[Read more]