We’re thrilled to announce important news for our LDL community: LSU Libraries has been awarded a grant from Collections as Data: Part to Whole, an effort made possible by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The grant will allow LDL practitioners to gather and collaboratively explore policies and practices around creating digital content for the LDL.
The grant provides funding for the development and creation of collections as data: online collections that not only provide access to digital facsimiles of archival material, but also make material open to computational use and novel research methods. This grant enables the LDL community to explore options for applying this framework to our own collections. For example, we can configure the LDL to allow users to bulk download digital items as well as descriptive information about those items and, when relevant, plain text transcriptions. With this download capability a researcher could, for example, create a digital map of the parishes represented in specific collections, discover the words and phrases most commonly used in a set of letters, or uncover every city mentioned in hundreds of issues of a digitized newspaper.
Such powerful download capabilities are exciting, but they also require thoughtful discussion of responsibility and ethics--discussion that will be possible when LDL members gather as a community.
The grant will run for sixteen months, during which time the grant team will:
1. Send out an initial survey to capture a snapshot of current digitization policies and practices, as well as the community’s familiarity with the collections as data framework
2. Release two pilot projects of collections as data to serve as examples
3. Host a multi-day LDL Institute, which will be the first time content administrators and other representatives from LDL participating institutions will have the chance to gather and discuss these topics
4. Send out a closing survey to determine any changes in digitization policies and practices
This is an exciting opportunity for all of us in the LDL community. Questions can be directed to Sophia Ziegler, sziegler1@lsu.edu.
More About the Grant
The LSU Libraries team, along with 5 other institutions, will be a part of the second Collections as Data: Part to Whole cohort, an effort launched to provide cultural heritage institutions the resources to explore, document, and share strategies for developing computational collections. The CFP for the grant is here: https://collectionsasdata.github.io/part2whole/cfp/. The full list of funded projects is here: https://collectionsasdata.github.io/part2whole/cohort/.
The project will begin in January 2020, and conclude in April 2021.
Project team members include:
Sophia Ziegler, Head of Digital Programs and Services, LSU Libraries;
Gina Costello, Associate Dean of Technology Initiatives and Special Collections, LSU Libraries;
Leah Powell, Digital Collections Librarian, LSU Libraries; and
Elizabeth Joan Kelly, Digital Programs Coordinator, Loyola University.
More About the Collections as Data Framework
For more about the collections as data framework, see The Santa Barbara Statement on Collections as Data, and Rebekah Cummings, Anna Neatrour, Jeremy Myntti, and Rachel Wittmann’s article “From Digital Library to Open Datasets: Embracing a ‘Collections as Data’ Framework.”
For examples of how content from the LDL can be used as data, see Scott Ziegler and Cara Key’s article “More than a Pretty Interface: The Louisiana Digital Library as Data Hub.”
