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Spring Workshop 2007
Speaker Summaries
Logging the Academic Life: Connecting to Students and Their Digital Histories
Scott Carlson, Chronicle of Higher Education
“Lifelogging in Academia”
More and more people are recording their everyday conversations and experiences through cell phones, digital audio recorders, digital cameras, GPS devices, and even instruments that measure and record brain waves. The researchers and enthusiasts of this activity call themselves "lifeloggers," and they believe that in the futre you will be a lifelogger, too. Scott Carlson will discuss his brief experence as a "lifelogger" and what this activity means for librarians, archivists, privacy advocates, and educators.
Scott Carlson is a senior reporter for The Chronicle of Higher Education, covering libraries, technology, the arts, and architecture. His work has also appeared in The Baltimore Sun, Baltimore City Paper, Style Magazine, the Utne Reader, and many other publications.
L. Suzanne Kellerman, Pennsylvania State University Christopher M. Raab, Franklin and Marshall
Breakout Session A:
"Digitizing Campus
Newspapers"
Ambitious newspaper digitization projects at Penn State and Franklin and Marshall are illuminating student life and greatly simplifying access to campus history. What happens when the student rag becomes the "newspaper of record?"
L. Suzanne (Sue) Kellerman is the Judith O. Sieg Chair for Preservation and Head of the Digitization and Preservation Department at the University Libraries at Penn State. She is responsible for preservation programs activities in conservation, collections care, commercial binding, preservation microfilming, mass deacidification, disaster recovery and response, and digital library production initiatives that include digital conversion, e-publishing and preservation of electronic assets. Preservation microfilming and digital conversion of historic Pennsylvania newspapers including collegiate newspapers is an active strategic initiative. Within Pennsylvania, Sue, serves as the Project Director for the NEH-funded Pennsylvania Newspaper Project 2006-2008 and serves as chair of the statewide Pennsylvania Newspaper Project Advisory Board for selection. Sue also serves on PALINET’s Pennsylvania Advisory Committee for Collaborative Digitization, its Preservation Advisory Group, and the Pennsylvania Preservation Consortium Advisory Committee.
Christopher Raab administers the Franklin and Marshall College Archives and Special Collections, overseeing acquisitions, arrangement and description, cataloging, digitization, exhibits, gifts, grants, personnel, preservation, and user access. He also coordinate the Friends of the Library and serve as Preservation Officer for the Franklin and Marshall College Libraries. He is the director of the College’s newspaper project.
Richard Griscom, University of Pennsylvania
John Osborne, Dickinson College
Breakout Session B: "Digitizing the Best
Student Scholarship"
"Mustering CUREJ: The Preservation and Promotion of Undergraduate Research at Penn". The University of Pennsylvania was founded on the principle of uncompromising scholarship and its practical application, and Penn's College of Arts and Sciences was among the first to formally support and encourage undergraduate students to participate in meaningful research with faculty mentors. The College Undergraduate Research Electronic ournal (CUREJ) presents a sampling of that research and celebrates the academic achievements of Penn's young scholars.
Richard Griscom is Head of the Music Library at Van Pelt Library, University of Pennsylvania, and Project Leader for ScholarlyCommons@Penn
John Osborne, Dickinson College Osborne received a doctorate from Stanford in 1979 and has been at Dickinson ever since, teaching in the history department. His specialty is in British History but his long time concentration in teaching historical methods brought him in turn to Dickinson's archival holdings, 19th century American history, and digital scholarship. Osborne and Jim Gerencser of the Dickinson College Library are the editors of THE CHRONICLES, a compendium of web-based scholarship and student efforts on Dickinson history drawn from the archives. The two went on to found and Osborne to direct the Dickinson Electronic Initiative in the Liberal Arts (DEILA) as a umbrella for digital projects at the College about five years ago. In connection with such projects, John has presented at Edinburgh in Scotland at a 2002 international conference on DIGITAL RESOURCES FOR THE HUMANITIES and most recently in Manchester in England at a conference on Patagonia, one of expanding digital projects in DEILA. His latest involvement is with the HOUSE DIVIDED project, an ambitious on-line treatment of the the two decades leading up to the American Civil War, centering on the experiences of Dickinson students in that period but including the full chronicle of how the U.S. came to be divided and each other's throats.
Julia Maserjian, Lehigh University
Breakout Session C: "Immortalizing Student
Work in Digital Projects"
In an effort to preserve a vital part of their institutional memory, Lehigh University made the commitment to archive outstanding student scholarship. From prize winning writing to documentary video coursework, the University is presenting student scholarship as part of Digital Library projects. Faculty and staff have been asked to present on these efforts at regional and national New Media Consortium conferences.
Julia is the Digital Library Project Coordinator in Library and Technology Services at Lehigh University.
Richard T. Sweeney, New Jersey Institute of Technology
“Libraries Connecting Millennial
Scholars in an Archived World”
Archived social network communications offer a new way for libraries to speed and improve searching and learning, but will also have unintended consequences. The future Millennial friendly academic library offers huge potential benefits (and some non-trivial disadvantages) in the development of the personalized, customized, socially networked, peer to peer academic library. The benefits include saving learner's time, accelerating their learning, allowing them to time shift their work, and greatly improving their understanding. The disadvantages include little time for reflection and thought, archived material that can't be corrected, always remembered, sabotaged, corrupted and/or lost. Archiving personal (life logging) traits and habits as well as staying connected much of the time are two perquisites for creating these significant learner benefits. Frequent critical thinking about how to effectively plan, discover, use, and create new knowledge is much more difficult when one is constantly interrupted (staying connected) and when dealing with the unintended consequences of networked personal archives. Academic librarians must be important agents in speeding how students learn through effective use of their personal archives and portfolios but they also must assist learners in protecting themselves from unintended and undesired consequences.