Month: June 2016

Almost one year ago (May 2015) Doyle Calhoun, an honors student and senior in the Departments of Slavic & Eastern Languages and Literatures, and Romance Languages and Literatures majoring in Linguistics and French, approached the Digital Scholarship Group at the Boston College Libraries with an idea for a digital project, which would stem from his work on his senior thesis under his advisor Margaret Thomas. He was interested in analyzing a set of 24, mid-19th to early-20th century, dictionary/grammars compiled by French Catholic missionaries working in North and Central Africa. These texts are held in the Nicholas M. Williams Ethnological Collection of the John J. Burns Library at Boston College. They document over 18 different African languages (such as Banda, Koongo, Tachawit, and Wolof) and aimed to record the grammatical and lexical facts of indigenous languages.

In order to make the texts accessible and to use them in the context of a digital project, the first step was to digitize them and make them available online. The selection/review and digitization of texts was overseen by the Digital Library Program and Burns Library staff. One of the project goals was to create new data about the texts, which would be very valuable to scholars and students interested in linguistics and missionary grammars. Another goal was to make this data accessible and searchable, as well as to provide a medium for scholars, students, and other interested users to interact and use the data along with the digitized texts. Achieving these goals required a number of approaches, methods, and technologies as well as combined expertise and time from many people.

Making the data accessible and searchable required that we first create metadata about each primary source, which would later be ingested into a database (PostgreSQL) and presented in an HTML/Ruby environment. Calhoun worked with Nina Bogdanovsky (subject liaison to Linguistics) and Anna Kijas (Digital Scholarship Librarian) to identify bibliographic and target language metadata, identify target languages designated by the primary source and corresponding modern-day designations, and to categorize texts according to genre and subgenre. In addition, Calhoun identified the directionality for texts that were vocabularies or dictionaries and mapped each text’s organizational structure based on the hierarchical ordering in the primary source.

From this data, we were able to identify several prosopography opportunities, which led to the creation of an author-ography (data about each missionary), org-ography (data about each missionary order or organization), and a publication gazetteer (data about each text’s place of publication). In collaboration with Kijas, Calhoun text encoded the prosopographies according to the TEI P5 standards. These can be viewed as XML files on the project site, as well as in the TAPAS repository, which preserves and provides access to TEI XML documents. Several other text samples were also encoded, including the preface and a dictionary entry from Dictionnaire Français-Wolof et Wolof-Français. The purpose of encoding this data and text samples was two-fold: first it enabled a close reading of the content and provided a learning opportunity for Doyle, and secondly it acts as a proof-of-concept that could be at a later point applied to the entire corpus in order to render the TEI XML files with added linguistic analyses, cross-references, and visualizations of the text. Ben Florin (Web Developer) developed a PostgreSQL database running on a Ruby on Rails framework, which pulled in the metadata and digitized texts. A reader was created to display the texts alongside the hierarchy (linking to corresponding sections in the text) and metadata. The database can be explored by texts and language groups or through a search interface.

The final part of this project required creating an HTML site where all of the content could be accessed and searched. We modified an existing HTML5up theme (Helios) for this purpose and developed content, narrative, and documentation about this project, as well as connected it with the data. All of the code and files were uploaded onto GitHub where we continued to work collaboratively and without risk of accidently deleting or writing over each other’s work. All of the technical infrastructure (see Project Praxis) and code used and developed for this project is open source and the project is licensed under a CC-BY-NC license.

This project is a great example of the type of expertise, collaboration and support that the staff at the Boston College Libraries can provide for digital scholarship work. In addition, this opportunity provided Calhoun with new skillsets, including understanding and application of XML and TEI, MarkDown and GitHub, as well as visualization tools for mapping his data. It also exposed him to the aspects of project management as well as project planning, and development, which will be invaluable to him as he embarks on future digital activities beyond Boston College.

Missionary Linguistics in colonial Africa/Corpus de travaux linguistiques des missionnaires is now available online.

Special Collections Online: a new search interface

Our new discovery layer to find and access digitized special collections, Special Collections Online (SCO), is now live at Boston College Libraries Special Collections Online

This new Beta site is a vast improvement for searching our scanned special collections, including photographs, rare books, manuscripts and other archival material from the BC Libraries. The speed of searching, and faceting of results, bring the look and feel up-to-date and offers a more responsive and intuitive user experience.

The current “soft launch” will allow faculty, staff, students, and other interested users an opportunity to test and comment on the new tool before the previous interface is replaced in early May. You are encouraged to submit comments and feedback to mckelvee.bclsco.info@bc.edu. The full public release will take place in early May.

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Online users will find Boston College collections much easier to find. BC Libraries has further increased access to our digitized special collections by depositing metadata into the Digital Commonwealth. The Digital Commonwealth is a collection of digitized cultural heritage materials held by Massachusetts libraries, museums, historical societies, and archives. The site provides access to thousands of images, documents and sound recordings.

The Digital Commonwealth is also the Massachusetts hub for the Digital Library of America. Depositing our content into Digital Commonwealth means that we also gain exposure in the DPLA site at dp.la. The DPLA interface provides access to over 11,000,000 items digitized by organizations across the United States.

Following a year-long strategic and organizational planning process that coincided with retirements in several areas, the Boston College Libraries will be filling eight positions this spring and summer. While we always redefine positions before posting them, this unusually high number of simultaneous vacancies allowed us to think creatively and broadly before determining what the new positions would be. We are excited about hiring so many new people onto our staff and are equally excited by the new services they will provide. For several of these candidates, we are fortunate to have the assistance of faculty members who will participate in the interview process and provide valuable feedback to help us select a candidate who is the perfect fit for the Boston College community. Below is a brief description of the new positions.

The Head of Special Collections Technical Services (Burns Library) will direct and manage a broad array of functions pertaining to the description and preservation of rare books and special collections, and lead the team that catalogs, conserves, and maintains the storage of Burns Library collections.

The Head of Digital Scholarship will lead a team and colleagues across BC to envision, plan and deliver innovative and sustainable digital research. Through exploration of new technologies and engagement with digital scholarship and digital library practices, standards and systems, this individual will provide strong leadership, coordination, and project management for the team, as well as a technical expertise.

The Digital Scholarship Librarian / Bibliographer (2 positions: Liaison to English or History) will advance digital scholarship by providing research services, technical support, and project management assistance for members of the BC community engaged in technology-rich scholarly projects. Both librarians will maintain deep knowledge and practical expertise in an evolving interdisciplinary landscape of digital scholarship tools and methods, including but not limited to textual and spatial analysis, statistical computation, and data visualization. Each position will also serve as Bibliographer / Liaison for either English or History.

The Collection Development Librarian (and Social Sciences Bibliographer) will provide leadership and stewardship of Library collections across all subjects, with an emphasis on the social sciences. This person will also provide research services and instruction for either the Lynch School of Education, or the Political Science Department and the interdisciplinary programs of Asian and Asian American Studies, Islamic Civilization and Societies, Jewish Studies, and International Studies.

The Reference Librarian/ Bibliographer (Social Sciences) will provide research services and instruction for either the Lynch School of Education, or the Political Science Department and the interdisciplinary programs of Asian and Asian American Studies, Islamic Civilization and Societies, Jewish Studies, and International Studies. This person will develop collections which support the research, teaching, curriculum and educational needs within the assigned subject areas.

The Discovery Services Librarian will provide access to scholarly resources and services by managing, developing, and supporting public-facing discovery and access applications (e.g. Primo, ILLiad, Rapid, NRE, OJS, Islandora).

Every responsible organization needs to reflect and reconsider its place in its community every five to seven years. So too with University Libraries. The pace of change in libraries has been meteoric over the past decade and those that fail to innovate tend to be left in the proverbial dust. It is the role of the University Librarian to facilitate innovation and create a culture open to creativity, service excellence, and continuous improvement. As it turns out, this past March marked my seventh anniversary at Boston College, providing a timely opportunity for reflection and reconsideration.

Working with dedicated staff in the Libraries and across the University has been the best part of my experience so far. We are fully supported by the BC Administration and have benefitted from collaboration in all areas, including and, in fact, especially our collaborations with students. But talk is cheap, so over the past few months several of my library colleagues and I have put together a document that tells part of the story of the past seven years and outlines key areas of growth for the Libraries. The document is the product of the collaborative work of many intelligent individuals who understand that what is good for Boston College is good for them, not the other way around, and that “good is the enemy of great.”

Although the document highlights many areas, it is critical to recognize that not all the work within the Libraries can be easily seen, but it has all been essential for the successes we have experienced together over the last several years. Our Library Story (PDF) includes many unsung heroes, and to them, I am extremely grateful.

I hope you enjoy Our Library Story and continue to provide feedback and suggestions to help us in our quest to better serve all facets of the Boston College community. It’s been a wonderful seven years, and I am excited about the future of Boston College and the ways the Libraries can help us all work together in our quest of “Ever to Excel”.

Did you know that the John J. Burns Library holds a sizable collection of British author Graham Greene’s correspondence, literary manuscripts, papers, and even his personal library? We do and we are excited to announce that it is once again open to researchers! The Graham Greene papers and personal library were first acquired by the Burns Library in 1995, and we worked quickly to make the content available for use as soon as possible. Over the years, we acquired more material and hastily provided access, but the collections became unruly to use and the indexes (“finding aids”) weren’t available online. Recently, we set to work to make things better.

The first step was to discontinue researcher access while we gathered together our Greene holdings and analyzed them. Next, we did lots of archival work: we used new folders and boxes to promote long-term preservation; conserved maps that had been folded and stained; researched correspondents and chose standard name formats; and wrote a new streamlined finding aid. The collection is open again and you can now learn about all our Greene archival holdings through one record in the library catalog, which is linked to a single finding aid (PDF). This significant improvement is the result of the work of many throughout the Boston College Libraries.

Because archival collections are naturally interdisciplinary, anyone could approach any collection through any academic lens and learn something new; the Graham Greene papers have a lot to offer researchers in many fields. Greene was an author who wrote popular fiction and nonfiction and worked on screenplays and films. He was a spy(!). He was a Catholic who struggled with his faith. He traveled and was drawn, through work and personal interest, to areas in political turmoil. He lived in a time of old-school correspondence on paper and exchanged letters with many interesting and influential people on a wide array of topics. The collection is modern with the bulk of material dating between 1940 and 1989 and includes many formats, including correspondence and literary drafts, proofs, and reviews, as well as art, clippings, ephemera, legal documents, maps, objects, passports, photographs, postcards, posters, playbills, programs, research material, and scrapbooks.

We are excited to support your research use of this collection. Please plan to come in and take a look. To use the Graham Greene papers, consult the finding aid (PDF), identify boxes of interest, and then come to the reading room to see the material. We will retrieve as much material as you’d like to see. To use Graham Greene’s personal library, conduct an advance search for Local Collection Name contains phrase “Greene’s Library” and browse or filter the results. Greene annotated his books; the annotations can be interesting when juxtaposed with correspondence in the collection. Again, we are happy to retrieve books for you to use in the reading room. Anyone interested in learning about the fascinating life of the writer of Our Man in Havana, The End of the Affair, and the classic film The Third Man can delve into primary research and make their own discoveries.