NFAIS Humanities Roundtable VI: Scholarly Information in a Hybrid Environment

When:
Monday, October 22, 2007

Location:
The Graduate Center
of
The City University of New York
365 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10016
Ground Floor, Martin E. Segal Theatre
 

  Final Agenda

8:15am - 9:00am: Registration

9:00 - 10:00 University Publishing in a Digital Age
 

The authors of the Ithaka Report, University Publishing in a Digital Age , have been invited to speak about the research and recommendations included in that report. Ithaka.org, a research group, surveyed heads of scholarly presses and interviewed university presidents and provosts in an attempt to determine the status of those presses and future role in the dissemination of information in the scholarly community.

Speaker: Rebecca Griffiths, Co-Author of University Publishing in a Digital Age, Ithaka [Slides]

10:00 - 11: 00 Contract Licensing: Hal's Top Ten

Attendees will gain from an overview of desirable licensing clauses that will support and protect the value of their content in negotiations with aggregators.

Speaker: Hal Espo, President, Contextual Connections, LLC. [Slides]

11:00 - 11:15 Break

11:15 - 12:45 Web 2.0 and the Humanities

This session is a discussion of trends in Web 2.0, Museum 2.0 and Library 2.0 technologies. This session is intended to highlight initiatives that have immediate relevance to content providers in the humanities such as book reviews appearing on blogs, supporting user-generated content within traditional information environments and social tagging initiatives in museum settings.

Sarah Weinman, author and blogger at Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind 
Nicole Engard, Princeton Theological Library [Slides]
Michael Jenkins, Metropolitan Museum of Art

12:45 - 1:30 Lunch

1:30 - 3:00 Thesauri, Indexing and Social Tagging

This session is intended to span the gap between traditional indexing and creation of controlled vocabulary and indexing by collective intelligence and/or automated intelligence.

Speakers will address the pros and cons of their approaches based on the following:

• Level of expertise necessary
• Direct and indirect costs associated with the specific approach
• Enhancement to precision searching, navigation
• Effectiveness in combination with other elements of online information (example, fielded data vs. unstructured data; user-generated content)
• Potential application of these models to non-traditional repositories of full-text literatureSpeakers:
   

Tim Spalding, Founder, LibraryThing
Bella Hass Weinberg, St. John's University
Jay Datema, New York Public Library and Bookism.org 

3:00 - 3:15 Break

3:15 - 4:00 Discovery: Google and Secondary Databases

The assumption that generalized search engines, such as Google, will subsume specialized research databases serves as the beginning of a thought but does not form a conclusion. Initiatives such as Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic-live Search, in fact, suggest that scholarly research requires specialized search engines. Surveys of art historians reflect the value that fundamental features of research databases --identifying bodies of literature, defining field-specific vocabularies, and providing abstracts and indexing -- hold for scholars in the humanities. As the academic cousins of generalized search engines broaden discovery of scholarly literature, the importance of filtering and navigating search results increases. The rapidly changing information structure enabled by the Web challenges the efficacy of both generalized search engines and specialized research databases in meeting the corresponding evolving needs of the academic community. A comparison of the strengths of each strategy suggests potential for a complementary versus a competitive existence. Such a perspective enables a discussion on the adaptation of existing resources rather than resignation to a fate of obsolescence.

Erik Nemeth, Ph.D., The J. Paul Getty Trust  [Slides]

4:00 - 4:45 New Initiatives in the Humanities

This session will feature a discussion of the recently launched, Footnote.com, which has digitized primary historical documents which are subsequently tagged by the supporting community. The speaker will address the challenges of developing this information resource and discuss the growth of the social network that actively participates in the creation of value.

Speaker: Justin Schroepfer, Director of Marketing, Footnote.com

4:45pm Adjourn