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As Boston College’s institutional repository, eScholarship@BC showcases and preserves the scholarly output of the University. Archiving the publications of its research centers is an important part of that. Currently, there are over 1300 works in eScholarship@BC from research centers on campus. These include articles, reports, working papers, e-books, and videos. Over the past year, the library has reached out to many centers and has added substantially to these collections.

Here are highlights of recent additions to eScholarship@BC from research centers:

Center for Retirement Research

eScholarship@BC now has a comprehensive collection of reports and working papers from the Center for Retirement Research (CRR), ranging from 1999 to present. The topics covered in these publications include Social Security, state and local pensions, health/long-term care, financing retirement, and older workers. The total collection now includes 371 working papers and 315 reports, including their “Issue in Brief” and “State and Local Pension Plans” series. For more information about CRR, please visit its website.

TIMSS & PIRLS International Study Center

A collection of fifty publications from the TIMSS & PIRLS International Study Center was also added to eScholarship@BC in the last year. For two decades, TIMSS & PIRLS has published research related to its assessments of student achievement around the world. TIMSS & PIRLS is based at the Lynch School of Education and is a part of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement. In addition to the electronic copies in eScholarship@BC, the library also now has print volumes of these resources in our collections. For more information about TIMSS & PIRLS, please visit its website.

Center on Wealth and Philanthropy

In the spring of 2015, we added to our existing collection of works from the Center on Wealth and Philanthropy (CWP), in anticipation of its closure later that year. In total, there are now 70 publications from the center, including reports, statistics, and working papers. These works represent many decades worth of research and scholarly output from the center regarding philanthropy. Even though the center is now closed, this digital content will continue to be preserved by the library for the long term.

Church in the 21st Century Center

Over the years, the library has also worked with the Church in the 21st Century center (C21) to archive and provide additional access to the center’s online webcasts of C21-sponsored events on campus as well as other publications. The collection of C21 webcasts in eScholarship@BC currently includes over 200 videos (from 2011 through 2014, plus select videos from the 2000’s). The eScholarship@BC team is continuing to work with the center to add additional videos and to develop this collection further going forward. In addition to the material in eScholarship@BC, the library has also archived the C21 Resources magazine on newspapers.bc.edu. For more information about C21, please visit its website.

In addition to the recent work with these centers, eScholarship@BC also includes publications from other centers, including the Center for Human Rights and International Justice, the Center on Aging & Work (262 publications), and the Sloan Work and Family Research Network (75 papers). For more information about eScholarship@BC’s collaboration with Boston College research centers, please feel free to visit the eScholarship@BC website or contact Emily Toner (emily.toner@bc.edu), eScholarship Repository Librarian.

The Boston College Libraries has your back when it comes to providing the best resources for the Boston College community. We want to make sure that you have what you need, so, for 2016, we are providing new access to the multidisciplinary research tool, Scopus, for you to try and let us know what you think.

Scopus is similar to the Web of Science database in a number of ways. Both offer:

• Wide-ranging exploratory research searching
• Identification of potential collaborators at Boston College and beyond
• Scholarly productivity analysis, such as H-Index analysis
• Journal “impact” comparison tools, which can be useful in identifying potential journal publication targets
• Ability to discover funding sources

Scopus also brings useful functionality for answering questions like these:

Who does Boston College collaborate with most frequently? The list is vastly larger, but here you see the start of a list of institutions that work most closely with authors here. It’s easy to refine this list by discipline or topic.

When did researchers across the various disciplines start publishing on the topic of “State-building”? As you can see, in 1999, 52 documents using that description were published, and then the numbers quickly started rising to reach a peak of 296 in 2011.

Which BC departments are publishing in the area of “climate change”?

What are some good journals for me to consider for publishing this article?
The built-in journal comparison tool in Scopus lets you quickly compare up to 10 titles using a variety of metrics; these can be helpful in targeting journals for publication. Click on the “Browse Sources” link found near the upper right of the Search screen. Here you can see two journals compared for the percent of published documents that were not cited in a particular year. Below you’ll see another graph, this one shows the Impact per Publication by year for these same two journals.

Finally, what are all the publications in Scopus written by “Author X”?
Scopus makes it easy to distinguish authors with similar names – often a big challenge when you’re searching through the worldwide literature. Start by clicking the “Author Search” link. By filling out the information you have, you’ll be presented with the most likely author “profiles”, and from there it’s easy to see the list of associated publications. Note the ORCID search option, which allows for searching on an author’s unique ORCID ID, if they have registered for one.

It’s good to be aware that the two databases differ in chronological, subject and global content coverage. We know that these differences affect some disciplines more than others.

Chronological coverage:

• Web of Science, 1900 –
• Scopus, 1996 -, but with coverage expanding back to 1970 by the end of 2016

Subject and global coverage:

• Web of Science covers all disciplines
• Scopus also covers all disciplines, but has particular depth in the social sciences and sciences. Having said that, we have discovered pockets of great depth in various areas of the humanities.
• Web of Science is catching up, but Scopus still appears to provide more global coverage in its content.

Finally, we know that no database is comprehensive, and that you’ll almost certainly find new content in each database. Find more information here, and, again, please let us know what you think. Your feedback is important to us in making sound decisions on the makeup of the Boston College Libraries database collection.

“I arrived in Dublin on Holy Thursday…”

Although we are often excited about material the Burns Library acquires, we usually wait to tell potential researchers about our new collections until we’ve done our work: stabilizing and preserving through conservation and rehousing; arranging in a logical order; and describing through a catalog record and finding aid. Sometimes our enthusiasm gets the better of us, and we feel we must tell you about something before it is available for research; this is one of those times! We have just acquired from Loretta Clarke Murray, a private Irish collector, a significant body of material related to the 1916 Irish Easter Rising.

Here is a sneak peak of one item in the collection — an account by Margaret Skinnider set during Easter Week 1916 — we hope to make this and the full collection available to you in the next year.

The Easter Rising was an armed insurrection by Irish republicans to gain Ireland’s independence from Great Britain. It began on Easter Monday, April 24, 1916, when its leaders proclaimed the Irish Republic, and was fought in the streets of Dublin by soldiers of the Irish Citizen Army and Irish Volunteers. After an intense week of fighting, the outnumbered republicans surrendered on the following Saturday. Fifteen of the rebellion’s leaders were arrested and executed; hundreds of soldiers and civilians were killed and thousands wounded. One of the injured was Margaret Skinnider. Although Scottish by birth, Skinnider was an avid Irish republican, who played a key role as a member of the Irish Citizen Army and a skilled sharpshooter. Her Scottish accent enabled her to move freely about Ireland in the days leading up to the Easter Rising.

After fleeing to America, Skinnider published her account of the events in Doing My Bit for Ireland (1917), but our newly acquired, much briefer, handwritten journal appears to be her earliest recounting of those events.

In the journal, Skinnider provides a day-by-day account of her experiences during the conflict, beginning with her arrival in Dublin on Holy Thursday, through the action in which she was wounded, to her arrest in the hospital where she was recovering. The account includes encounters with James Connolly, Nora Connolly, Michael Mallin, Constance Markievicz, the Plunketts, and many others.

Although we have not yet fully explored the Loretta Clarke Murray collection, it promises to provide a unique perspective of the Irish nationalist movement through the eyes and words of female activists. In addition to Skinnider’s journal, the collection contains writings from Máire (Molly) Gill, member of the Cumann na mBan; Maude Gonne, head of the Women’s Peace Committee and founder of the Women’s Prisoner’s Defence League; and autograph books circulated by inmates in women’s prisons in Ireland in 1922-1924. Murray is also the source of bulk of the Burns Library’s collection of Cuala Press materials.

We are eager to share this new material with you and will write more about it, especially when the collection is processed and available for use. As you have questions about our other holdings regarding the Easter Rising, please contact us. Other archival collections at the Burns Library of interest on this general topic — and open for research use in the Library —are the Kathleen Daly Clarke papers and collection of Thomas Clarke and Irish political materials and Mary Boyle O’Reilly papers.

The Boston College Libraries recently joined as members of the ORCID organization. We think that broad adoption of ORCID IDs will have significant benefits for individual faculty members, graduate students and researchers at Boston College in addition to helping the University track scholarly output and the careers of its graduates.

ORCID stands for Open Researcher and Contributor ID.

One of the primary problems ORCID solves is name ambiguity. Research queries turn up articles by authors of the same name, across a wide variety of disciplines. This issue plagues researchers and university tenure committees alike and the problem increases as interdisciplinary work becomes more common. The ORCID ID is a unique, persistent number that identifies and travels with the researcher through changes in institution. It is not affected by name changes, cultural differences in name order, inconsistent use of initials, or use of different alphabets.

Registering for an ORCID is free for individual members and is easy and brief. Importing publication data using other system IDs and databases (Researcher ID, Scopus, CrossRef and MLA International Bibliography) is fairly seamless. ORCID tracks 37 types of works – including not just text but datasets, performances and art works, making it a system that can be used by all disciplines.

Organizations that track output are increasingly using ORCID to do so. Input fields for an ORCID show up in publisher submission forms, funding applications and university research tracking systems. Many systems make ORCID input mandatory. Over time, this collaborative effort will reduce redundant entry of biographical and bibliographical data into multiple systems. Grants from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation have supported adoption and integration projects across universities and professional associations. The list of ORCID member integrations is impressive, and includes organizations such as the American Physical Society, the British Library, Elsevier, ProQuest, PLoS, Wellcome Trust and Wiley.

At Boston College, the Libraries have integrated submission of an ORCID into the Boston College PhD dissertation workflow. As students submit their dissertations to ProQuest, they are given the option to submit an ORCID (or create and submit one). The ORCID is then added to the record information for the dissertation. As they continue to use their ORCID during their academic careers – in publishing, in grant applications, in profile pages, the University will have a new way to track the scholarly output of its graduates.

The new faculty annual reporting software, Data 180, can allow input of an ORCID ID and linking to the ORCID record. The Libraries, in collaboration with other departments, are just beginning to explore greater integration of ORCIDs in University systems. The more pervasive their adoption, the more useful they become. We hope to roll out a system for ORCID registration that will associate the ID holder with Boston College.

You’ll be hearing more about this as plans develop. In the meantime, you can register now for an ORCID, begin to build a complete online academic presence and distinguish yourself unambiguously from all other authors. Many of your colleagues already are doing so.

To learn more about ORCID and to follow our integration plans at Boston College Libraries, consult our ORCID guide. If you have questions or would like to share your experiences or feedback regarding ORCID, we would love to hear it – you can contact Jane Morris or your subject librarian.

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.