Category: article

The Digital Scholarship Group at Boston College Libraries and Dr. Michael Noone are proud to introduce Burns Antiphoner,  an interactive open access resource. Based on a 14th-century Franciscan antiphoner, music notation, metadata, performances and textual incipits can be queried and viewed via a dynamic presentation layer.^[1] This project represents ongoing collaboration from many scholars and agencies.  The website includes scholarly essays about the manuscript written by Dr. Graeme Skinner (Sydney Conservatorium of Music, University of Sydney) as well as videos of several performances from short sections of the manuscript by Schola Antiqua (dir. Juan Carlos Asensio Palacios), recorded in the Primate Cathedral of  St. Mary of Toledo, Spain. It received the support of an Academic Technology Innovation Grant at Boston College (2015 – 2017).

Missus est Gabriel (Missa est Gabriel [Missus est Gabriel] (fol. 17v)

About the manuscript:

(by Dr. Michael Noone and Dr. Graeme Skinner)

This fourteenth-century manuscript antiphoner (from the Latin antiphonale, or antiphonarium, a book of antiphons) is a volume of monophonic chant—plainsong, or plainchant—used by male or female religious personnel for singing the divine office of the Roman Catholic Church. In this instance, the book was almost certainly compiled for, and used by, members of the Franciscan (or Clarissan) order during the 1300s. The book contains the complete words and music for two genres of variable chants—antiphons and responsories—for the offices of the entire annual calendar of saints’ days (sanctorale), as well as text-only incipits or cues indicating other items to be sung, notably hymns (with metrical rhyming texts), and other items that were sung to simple melodic formulas (tones), such as versicles, psalms, and canticles (usually extracts from the Bible or other scriptures). As such, the volume originally complemented several other words-only books, including one containing the complete texts of the necessary psalms and canticles (psalterium). Another book also contained the words of the antiphons and responsories (without musical notation), and also the words of chapters and lessons (Biblical, patristic and hagiographic pericopes) and prayers, which were also sung to simple formulaic tones. The Franciscans—members of the Order of Friars Minor, founded by St. Francis—were the first to make and use the type of book described as a breviary (breviarium).

According to custom, there may have also been a companion volume containing the antiphons and responsories of the parallel annual Sunday cycle of the daily office (temporale), copied around the same time by some of the same scribes. By the late middle ages, it had become customary for liturgical chant books arranged in calendar order to begin with the pre-Christmas season. The movable temporal (Sunday) cycle started with the first Sunday in Advent, and the fixed-date sanctorale (saints-day) cycle with the major saint’s day usually closest to it, the feast of St. Andrew (30 November), as in the case of this manuscript.

The manuscript is currently on display in the exhibition Beyond Words: Illuminated Manuscripts in Boston Collections; Manuscripts for Pleasure & Piety, at the McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, from September 12 – December 11, 2016.

The interactive manuscript:

The interactive manuscript can be explored by scrolling through the digitized images of each folio (left side) with the corresponding incipit text (right side). Incipit texts (right side) contain information about the Feast, Office, Genre, and Mode relevant to each incipit, as well as musical notation that has been transcribed from the manuscript. The manuscript can also be searched according to the above descriptions (i.e. Feast), full-text, or musical incipit. A user guide includes further details and instructions on how to use the manuscript viewer.

The interactive manuscript was built on data drawn from the text and musical notation, which was was structured and encoded using MEI standards. This data is outputted as IIIF manifests and JSON, ingested and rendered with an IIIF image server and Lunr.js search index. The user interface was built on Diva.js and Jekyll. Our documentation, code, and data is shared in our GitHub repository, and the data is available to the scholarly community through a collaboration with CANTUS Database (CDB). Additional details outlining the technical infrastructure and praxis can be found online. This project involved collaboration with colleagues at Boston College and beyond, specifically staff in Digital Scholarship, Digital Library Programs, and Systems & Applications in the Boston College Libraries, the John J. Burns Library, and members of the Music Department.

Questions or feedback can be sent to Anna Kijas.

This fall, the Boston College Libraries are introducing two multi-touch tables in our public areas to engage students, display digital content, and provide new ways to introduce, exhibit and teach with materials digitally. Library staff has developed two projects for display using software for touch and multi-touch tables over the course of this past summer. The first uses a just developed tool called “Omeka Everywhere” to display photos of student life over the history of Boston College in a new and engaging way. Users can sort through images by date and keyword, zoom in to examine details in the high-definition images, and refer to information about the image. The exhibit offers a fun window into Boston College’s impressive history of campus life, and can show students how their experiences at BC  are both similar to – and different from – those of past students.

The second project comes from faculty research and is a product of teaming with the Libraries’ Digital Scholarship Group.  Prof. Michael Noone’s study of an original fourteenth-century music manuscript held at the Burns Library was released this month as an online project, called Burns Antiphoner. Users are presented with high resolution digital images of every page of this Franciscan liturgical book, plus new research and data, as described in this newsletter. Using the touch table, users are presented with an enhanced version of the online resource and the ability to view manuscript images up-close and in greater detail. This large format makes the online resource suitable for discussion, collaboration and teaching.

Over the course of the fall semester, additional content  will be rolled out on the touch tables, including an exhibit created by a current Boston College student as part of the Bookbuilders of Boston program. We look forward to finding more ways to partner with faculty and students to create new exhibits and develop digital scholarship projects that take advantage of the capabilities of these touch tables. The touch table is also available for use by classes and we are happy to work with faculty to find ways to integrate it into instruction.

Stop by the third floor lobby of O’Neill Library or the lobby of Burns Library to try out one of the touch tables today! If you are interested in learning more about the touch tables or would like to discuss future project ideas, please contact Anna Kijas (kijas@bc.edu), our Senior Digital Scholarship Librarian.

This is a cautionary tale about predatory open access journals. We want to warn you about their unethical practices so that you can protect yourself, but also urge you not to forego the benefits that open access provides because of a few bad actors.

Many factors led to the rise of open access journals. The widespread use of the internet and ease of digital creation made entry into the online journal field inexpensive and easy. The constantly rising costs of traditional journals, shrinking competition by fewer and fewer mega-publishers, creation of inflexible “big deal” packages of journals, and the entrenched systems of journal ranking that factor into tenure decisions are a few of the important catalysts.

New business models and new institution-based academic publishers have emerged to relieve pressure on library budgets and to wrest control of knowledge dissemination from the hands of a few publishers.  While most open access publications are funded by other means (institutional subsidies, for instance), many of the best known are funded by author fees or article publishing charges (APCs). When this model emerged, many observers of academic publishing were reminded of the old vanity publishers and assumed that these journals were not peer-reviewed or high-quality.

Journals such as BioMed Central and PLoS, both open access mega-journals, led the way in establishing the fact that a journal that charges APCs can nonetheless be high-quality and influential.

With a low barrier to entry (a web page and an email address), opportunists saw a chance to make easy money. They created fleets of open access journals with similar names, sometimes confusingly similar to prestigious journals. They engage in aggressive marketing campaigns for potential contributors and board members, targeting established academics and vulnerable early-career professionals and graduate students. They extoll the benefits of open access, but often, if you look beneath the hood, there is no quality content there.

Some outrageous practices of these predatory journals include:

• Listing no editorial board or naming board members without their consent or knowledge
• Naming one person as Editor of multiple journals on unrelated topics
• Claiming an “impact factor” when they do not have one, or have one from an impostor ISI (benefitting from confusion with the Institute for Scientific Information, the original creator of the impact factor)
• Claiming to be indexed by reputable indexes when they are not
• Advertising rigorous peer-review and a turn-around time that makes that claim implausible
• Failing to disclose article publishing fees until after acceptance of the article

One of the outraged observers of these practices, Jeffrey Beall, a scholarly communication librarian at the University of Colorado, Denver, has created a useful, often consulted but sometimes  controversial list of “potential, possible, or probable predatory open access scholarly publishers”. His criteria for adding a publisher to the list are a litany of reprehensible practices. But Beall himself has been criticized for being too quick to label a publisher as predatory, particularly journals not published in western countries. Our objection is to Beall’s willingness to declare that, “While open access (OA) was initially promising, its weaknesses quickly began to appear.” Beall seems to ascribe the unethical practices of these publishers to the open access business model. We would argue that the weaknesses here are not inherent to open access but to those who want to make a quick buck. An excellent analysis of Beall’s list, and a discussion of its place along with “white lists” of ethical publishers such as the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and the Open Access Scholarly Publisher’s Association (OASPA) is available in: Beyond Beall’s List: Better understanding predatory publishers by Monica Berger and Jill Cirasella. (2015, March) College & Research Libraries News, 76 (3), 132-135.

Recently the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has filed a complaint in Federal court against OMICS group, a publisher of over 700 open access journals. Inside Higher Ed reports that “[T]he commission is responding to a growing number of calls from people in academe for some sort of action to be taken against publishers that take advantage of scholars wishing to publish in open-access journals.” Their attorney stated:

“We take no sides between the traditional subscription model and the open-access model…. We believe both of them can be done in a fair, open, clear and lawful way. What we have a problem with here is people who are trying to benefit from the open-access model to scam people.”

The deficiencies of predatory journals are easy to discern with a quick background check. Our guide to Assessing Journal Quality includes a page on Open Access Journals and a checklist of positive and negative quality indicators that you can use to guide your evaluations. Being associated with a low-quality journal as an author or board member can be detrimental to your career, so it pays to be careful. If you have questions about a journal and would like a second opinion, your subject librarian can help you investigate their reputation.

In addition, it is important to understand the license that a journal applies to your work in order to make it open access. Most journals use some form of Creative Commons license. These define what re-use may be made of your work without asking for permission. The least restrictive Attribution license (CC-BY) allows a user to use the work for any purpose as long as they give appropriate attribution.  Some enterprising monograph publishers see this as free content to resell. Take a look at this monograph from Applied Research Press, for sale on Amazon for £237. If you “Look Inside” the book you will find an open access article freely available on BioMed Central. The license allows this, but it is disappointing to an author who expects her scholarship to be free. Be sure you understand the level of access that your chosen Creative Commons license conveys.

The benefits of open access; greater visibility, wider dissemination, higher citation counts, broader readership among non-specialists, and faster, more equitable dissemination of knowledge are too good to miss. They support the scholarly enterprise and the social justice mission of the University. It is important not to throw away those benefits because of the greed of a few bad actors. With a little due diligence you can avoid this trap and get the maximum exposure for your work.

Open October is coming! Watch the Library pages for more about Open Access at the BC Libraries.

Boston College Dataverse was launched on April 19^th, 2016 as the new data repository for researchers. At the second annual Dataverse Community Meeting at Harvard Medical School in July,  Barbara Mento, Data/GIS Librarian presented an overview of how Dataverse was introduced to Boston College researchers.

Other presentations included the building of Dataverse repositories in Brazil, China, Canada, and Germany along with implementations across the U.S. The uses of these dataverses range from coordinating data with mobile health tools, archiving economic data, and teaching empirical research to archiving world historical data.

To provide just one notable example, the Center for the History of Medicine Dataverse, which is still in development, supports the Center for the History of Medicine special collections. This archive will include oral histories and associated contextual records for oral histories conducted with individuals who participated in the NIH Normal Volunteer Patient Program between 1953 and 1983. This data will offer  a rich research environment for exploring clinical trials and how they were conducted and is an example the value  of non-numeric data  to researchers.

What was most impressive was the number of tools integrated with Dataverse, with more in the planning stages. In particular, BC researchers writing data management plans for proposals can benefit from this platform’s  integration with the DMP Tool. Other tools that have been integrated into Dataverse, include PLoS, DataCIte, and R. They also integrate Harvard’s WorldMap and TwoRavens statistical software for analysis of deposited data.

Presentations from the meeting are available at the Dataverse Community Meeting website. If you have any questions about depositing data in the Boston College Dataverse, please contact dataverse-support@bc.edu

In recent years, libraries have developed an increasingly integrated and flexible approach to working with faculty and students. Firmly based on building collections, providing research assistance, and offering classes in the use of library materials and databases, these still-relevant services have been augmented in areas that reflect the many new roles possible with technology and collaborative services.   For example, here at Boston College Libraries we have opened up our special collections for teaching and learning, and transformed our library spaces to better accommodate the dynamic needs of the Boston College community. Moreover, we continue to develop a robust digital library that provides global access to our unique content and collections.

In a few weeks, all faculty will receive a brochure outlining in detail a suite of services – many familiar, but several new – aimed at supporting faculty needs.  We view our services as increasingly integrated with digital content and web-based tools, and our expertise lies in facilitating the navigation of this complex world of content, helping faculty explore their creative and complex interests.

This newsletter features two of our latest collaborative digital scholarship projects that exemplify the services becoming a priority for the Libraries.  Emerging from faculty and student research, these two compelling new digital projects – one that brings a 14th century music manuscript to life and the other Seamus Connolly’s prized collection of Irish traditional tunes – demonstrate creative uses of materials from our special collections as new, open access resources.  They engage users digitally, widen access and understanding of materials, and provide new forms of scholarship and information presentation. The rare and unique materials of Burns Library have made it a treasure trove for digital scholarship and a teaching space that inspires new ideas and possibilities.

To further develop the digital scholarship program at Boston College, this fall the Libraries will play a central role in a selective pilot program with the Association of Research Libraries. The five selected institutions will delve into creative new ways of integrating digital tools into cutting edge scholarship. We are thrilled about our selection for inclusion in this three-day program and look forward to implementing the results to make an impact on our services and resources in this area for faculty.

To meet the demand for the latest equipment and software for digital creations, new attention has been given to the Digital Studio on Level Two in the O’Neill Library.  While the space remains focused on development of vital technical skills, we encourage exploration of new modes of media-rich and data-driven digital scholarship.  The Digital Studio includes technology and services for exploratory and early phase digital scholarship, including data analysis and visualization. Faculty can reserve a room outfitted with media viewing equipment and a Sound Room makes possible high-quality audio recording with microphone, keyboard, and audio composition and editing software. The Digital Studio will also be used for programming and instruction, including both technology office hours and workshops for faculty and students on the latest digital scholarship tools. The Studio is the result of a partnership between Boston College Libraries and Information Technology Services and is open to students, staff and faculty.

This is an exciting time for Boston College and the Libraries. We like to think of the possibilities and value proposition in terms of six C’s: Content, Collaboration, Creativity, Change, Character (formation), and Catholic (mission). These C’s are reflected in all the services and programs we provide, and the high-performing Library Staff are eager to explore, support and partner with faculty and students in all academic endeavors. Come join us!

Irish music followers worldwide will soon be able to stream and download hundreds of newly-released music tracks in The Séamus Connolly Collection of Irish Music, a digital collection that will be published by the Boston College Libraries on October 11. This exciting compilation features audio recordings of some of the best-known performers of Irish traditional instrumental music and song. With audio available via SoundCloud, the collection also offers music transcriptions and stories, and is fully compatible with mobile devices.

Originally from Killaloe in County Clare, Ireland, master fiddle player Séamus Connolly directed Irish music, song, and dance programming at Boston College for twenty-five years, and served as the Sullivan Artist-in-Residence from 2004 until his retirement in 2015. A ten-time All-Ireland fiddle champion, Connolly is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts’ National Heritage Fellowship and a Boston College Faculty Arts award.

The digital collection offers a window into traditional music through Connolly’s long experience as a performer and teacher. Thanks to the generosity of over one hundred performers, the collection’s ten playlists, containing a total of over 330 tunes and songs, will soon be made freely accessible worldwide via The Séamus Connolly Collection of Irish Music under a Creative Commons license.

The product of a three-year collaboration between the Boston College Libraries and Connolly, the digital collection reflects the work of many departments across the libraries, with Connolly’s own work on the project beginning nearly fifteen years ago. The collection complements the Séamus Connolly Papers, one of several archival research collections on Irish music at the John J. Burns Library. Please feel free to contact Burns Library staff for more information about the Séamus Connolly Papers, the digital collection, or Irish music resources in general. We invite you to preview the Séamus Connolly Collection of Irish Music at connollymusiccollection.bc.edu and to visit the full site on October 11th when the full collection is launched.

Since January of 2015, members of the Boston College community have had access to the Scopus database.  Scopus is a large multidisciplinary database, similar to the Web of Science database.  BC researchers and students are using Scopus for author, subject, and citation searching in a wide array of disciplines. Faculty can use it to find H-Index information, compare journal impact data, and analyze publication and citation trends. Scopus provides comprehensive coverage of a large number of journals from 1996 – present, with added older content (comprehensive coverage back to 1970 is expected by late 2016).  Due to very positive user feedback, the original Scopus trial has been funded and extended for another year to December 2017.

What are users saying about Scopus?  Comments from a campus-wide user survey, a graduate-student study, feedback sessions and website comments have indicated the following: users find the search interface easy to use and visually effective; they like that author searches more reliably retrieve results limited to the chosen author, rather than including results from other authors with the same name (a benefit of the sophisticated “disambiguation” algorithm embedded in the database); and they appreciate being able to see the connections between citing and cited articles (just as in Web of Science, but delivered in a different manner).

Many, however, especially appreciate the data and visual analysis tools delivered by Scopus.   These tools make it easy to see emerging research trends for individuals, academic departments and specific search terms.  Here you see screen shots showing visualization of data analysis resulting from a search for Boston College publishing on the topic of “climate change”.

Figure 1 shows how publishing on this topic has grown over time.

Under another tab (Figure 2), you can see the names of the BC authors who publish with greatest frequency on climate change topics.

Figure 3 shows the journals where BC authors publish tend to publish on this area of study.

Another tab, not shown here, reveals those BC campus departments publishing most prolifically in this area.  An additional tab shows BC author collaborations with researchers at other institutions in this work.  Similar results and visualization analysis can be applied at all levels of granularity, making Scopus a particularly effective tool for comparisons at the institutional, departmental, and/or specific topic level.

Those looking for multidisciplinary indexing of the journal literature, particularly in the Humanities, and those requiring journal literature indexing prior to 1996, continue to use the Web of Science.  Usage numbers for each database were quite similar this past summer.  If you have thoughts to share about either Scopus or the Web of Science or would like to learn more about either database, please contact the Scopus/Web of Science Task Force.

Learning to Use Scopus will be Required in “Tools for Scholarship” Course in the Graduate School of Social Work, Spring 2017:

Adam Williams, Senior Reference Librarian/Bibliographer, Social Work Library, will be working with Social Work graduate students when they take a Spring 2017 Canvas-based course on the skills they need to succeed in their program. Scopus will be one of the key components in the Library Resources module.  Dr. Marcie Pitt-Catsouphes, Director of the Social Work Doctoral program, and her team, reworked the Tools for Scholarship course into online, self-paced learning modules with sections on topics such as Citation, Academic Integrity, Human Subject Protections, and Library Resources.

The inclusion of Scopus in the Tools for Scholarship course came from the recommendation of doctoral students attending the libraries’ Scopus workshops throughout the past year. PhD students found the data visualization and search term analytics particularly valuable functions to help assess and revise their search strategy. The extensive citation tools in Scopus also helped doctoral students identify key authors on topics of interest.

The multidisciplinary nature of social work research makes Scopus an appealing resource. Dr. Pitt-Catsouphes and the doctoral students find Scopus to be a more robust and comprehensive alternative to Google Scholar for exploring the peer-reviewed literature in any field of study.”

At Boston College, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are tools used to “visualize, question, analyze, and interpret data to understand relationships, patterns, and trends.” Academic departments and centers across campus including Nursing, Social Work, Management, Economics, Education, History, Theology, Sociology, Corcoran Center for Real Estate and Urban Action and of course Earth and Environmental Sciences integrate GIS into instruction and research. The Boston College Libraries and ITS Research Services collaborate with BC GIS users and provide data and software support. This essay by Nicholas Libby describes how the Facilities Management Department, a full-service, centralized organization that works on the planning, design, construction, and maintenance of all University buildings, utilities, and properties, utilizes the many features of GIS in their daily work.

GIS IN FACILITIES

BC Libraries helped introduce GIS to Facilities Management about five years ago, where the initial objective was to map physical elements of the campus (i.e. buildings, walking paths, roads, etc.). Since then, over 100 maps have been created for departments throughout the University, a GIS Roundtable was formed to incorporate the thoughts of others interested in using GIS, a book of maps was published for key stakeholders of the University, and a presentation was given on the use of GIS in Facilities during the University’s Spring 2016 Tech Forum.

GIS maps that are built today in FMIS are categorized by project types such as Data Analysis, Asset Management, Engineering & Energy, Planning & Design, and Safety & Security. ArcGIS (GIS software innovated by Environmental Systems Research Institute) is unique in giving information analysts, like Nicholas Libby, the ability to visualize location-based data on a map for Facilities Management.

NOTE: The maps shown in this article were created by Nicholas Libby of the FMIS Department for the use of Facilities Management purposes only. For the sake of confidentiality, some data has been removed or manipulated for public appearance.

GIS ROUNDTABLE

In August 2014, the GIS Roundtable was established to bring together BC Faculty and Staff from across the University that have an interest in using ArcGIS as a base for a standardized campus map. Currently the GIS Roundtable is made up of over 30 members from numerous departments including the Boston College Libraries, Facilities Management, Boston College Police Department, Information Technology Services, Emergency Management, Office of Marketing and Communications, and more. There is a growing interest and awareness of the economic and strategic value of GIS, and if you or anyone you know would like to join the GIS Roundtable, please use the contact information below to submit a request. Please be advised, the GIS roundtable is for Faculty and Staff only.

ABOUT FMIS

In Facilities Management, the internal Information Systems Department (FMIS) is responsible for managing data, devices, and systems used throughout the University, including those related to GIS. The FMIS Department is made up of four full time personnel including Steven Bentley (Facilities Systems Analyst), Karin Harriman (Senior Archibus Analyst), Nicholas Libby (BIM & Facilities Information Analyst) and Lynn Berkley (Director of FMIS).

If you or someone you know would like to learn more about how GIS is being used in Facilities Management, or would like to gain access to non-confidential campus related GIS data, please email one of the following contacts below.

• Nicholas J. Libby | BIM & Facilities Information Analyst – libbyn@bc.edu
• Lynn Berkley | Director of FMIS – berkleyl@bc.edu
• FMIS Department – help@bc.edu

Submitted by:  Facilities Management Information Systems Department (FMIS)

If this has inspired you to learn more about how you might use GIS tools, BC Libraries and ITS, Research Services co-teach “Introduction to GIS” workshops every semester. For dates see: http://www.bc.edu/offices/researchservices/tutorials.html We are also happy to provide individual training sessions.

If you have any questions or wish to request a consultation, contact Barbara Mento, Data/GIS librarian. The Eighth Annual GIS Contest celebrating student work will be held in the Spring. Details coming in November.

It is a defining mark of any major academic library to possess an extensive collection of materials in many languages which represent the distinct and special knowledge areas reflected through these languages and the global nature of scholarship.   The Boston College Libraries provide a strong example of this and collect widely in French, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Latin, Greek and Irish.  We also have holdings in a number of other languages including Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese, Dutch, Hebrew, Japanese, Polish, among others.  These holdings include books, journals, and newspapers both in print and electronic formats, as well as films and other media.

Multilingual holdings are prominent throughout the humanities collection, especially in the areas of theology, philosophy, literature, and history as well as the social sciences.  The Russian collection is especially strong in literature.  It’s interesting to note that while many journal and monograph series titles may be in one language, they often contain essays in multiple languages.  One notable example is the interdisciplinary collaborative encyclopedic work of scholarship Aufstieg und Untergang der rӧmischen Welt (The Rise and Decline of the Roman World) which contains essays in multiple languages as well as in English.  

Also, the foreign language collection is not limited to O’Neill Library but extends across all of the Boston College Libraries.  The Bapst Library has holdings in art and art history in many languages, while the Educational Resource Center has a sizable collection of children’s books in Spanish that are perfect not only for children, but also for students developing their language skills.  The Special Collections in Burns Library contains many foreign language works including many rare texts in Latin and Spanish within the Jesuitica collection and special materials in the Irish language.

So the next time you want to look at Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes, are searching for the novel Cien Años de Soledad by Gabriel Marcia Marquez, or want to read one of the volumes of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, take a look at the holdings at Boston College Libraries or speak to the library staff.  You’ll most likely be surprised and amazed at what you’ll find.  And if by chance we don’t have the foreign language work you are looking for, we can look at adding it to our collection or obtain it for you through Interlibrary Loan.